


Death Mountain

by OneTrueStudent



Series: The Gloaming [10]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-11
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-10-30 13:34:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10877838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneTrueStudent/pseuds/OneTrueStudent
Summary: Everything goes well.Takes place immediately after BloodharvestThere's at least one intermission chapter which throws off the numbering. I'm not sure what to do about that.





	1. Met by Starlight

**Author's Note:**

> Everything goes well. 
> 
> Takes place immediately after Bloodharvest
> 
> There's at least one intermission chapter which throws off the numbering. I'm not sure what to do about that.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Revised, changed whole-story structure
> 
> 9/30 grammar and spelling fixes

I have a conflicted relationship with my sister. On the one hand, she's a happy little homemaker who never makes waves outside the PTO and raises her kids in placid respectability. On the other hand, I'm absolutely certain she's going to outlive me.

Luthia had hired me to rescue her lover Orweil from Death Mountain (that is what they named it). I was fair to middling certain Orweil was a vampire, and I was very certain Luthia would kill me if I tried to do anything about it. Admittedly, there wasn't much to do if Orweil was a vampire. I would try to kill him on general principle, and Luthia did not seem inclined to take that philosophically. I'd caught her muttering, 'Death couldn't have him.' Now, for my own comfort, I liked to think she meant Death, as in Death Mountain, and thus she was intent on the rescue. If she meant death the phenomenon and meant to tear him from the jaws of eternal slumber if necessary, well, that would be bad. Luthia was one of the strongest sorceresses I've ever met. She was capable of pulling form from madness.

So I met the sis by mirror, and we had tea. I rented a lovely little sitting room with slim, elegant furniture lacquered in red and blue. A server laid the table under two tall lamps, a round table with sides that folded down. Once he was gone I moved the setting to a dresser top facing a standing mirror. An odd little crystal danced between my fingers. It was at first cold and frosty, but melted until the surface ran like thick molasses. I wiped it on the mirror until my reflection blinked, and I told her to scamper off and get the sis. My reflection grumbled.

I never grumble like that.

When the sis appeared in the reflection, she was delighted to sit down with me and quickly laid a setting on her own. She was at her house in Virginia, and we had a lovely meal, toasting occasionally cup-to-glass through the reflection. She stood before an entryway table in her foyer. Motherhood became her. Before the wedding she'd been nice sometimes, but kept her boundaries high and well defined. She smiled more now, was more interested in my life, and more welcoming of me to hers. Since this was a special moment, she had sparkling wine and urged me to have some as well. 

Motherhood had not taught Jay that breakfast was for vodka, but I didn't pick that battle. She recommended something I had the server pass me through a door I blocked with my body, a dry white, and I had half a bottle. Delightful stuff. I had it straight. I guess that's how you drink wine.

I broached the matter of my impending demise. "Jay, I'm going on an adventure."

"Have fun!" she chirped.

"It will be terrible."

"You've always enjoyed terrible."

"The people I'm going with may be traitors and monsters."

"Colorful characters." She smiled.

"If you could, would you want to come?"

"No. No, I would not."

"Why not?" I asked.

We had a staring match where neither of us was properly communicating across a divide of identical words. A four-year old came in and told Jay he had spilled his juice. She excused herself. I wasn't there when she returned.

I didn't have time to research vampires, so I went off what I could remember. The Blasphemous claim their forbearer was one of Gorat's Furies. He grew incensed at the wargod's relentlessness and fell upon him from behind, spilling his blood on the men Gorat had killed. Gorat survived. The Blasphemous don't seem to multiply either by sex or feeding, and they stay hidden. They do have an affection for fighters, and Orweil was a fighter. Had been. Frankly, Orweil was probably dead. That didn't make me feel better.

Breeders were a more classic set. They fed on any sentient race (and one shrub, the dragon plants of the Grey Tarn), and elders slowly lose their ability to eat mortal prey. They distill, or stew, in their own power until they feed exclusively on their own children. Breeders wage terrible wars against each other for themselves as food. They can be killed merely by sunlight, while the Blasphemous are only weakened. Fire did the trick on Breeders too. I thought they could be killed by chopping and stabbing, but there was another part. Their bodies had to be salted? Something like that.

Ghouls are magicians who gain power by drinking blood. I was most worried Orweil was a ghoul, but least worried if he was. He wouldn't be able to walk through mirrors or feed on shadows. He could walk in sunlight, but he was vulnerable to stabbing, bludgeoning, falls from great heights, or a sharp stick. I was ignoring that he would be an obscenely powerful mage who'd further increased his power by dark rituals, but at least he'd be a human obscenely powerful evil mage.

Thinking about it, none of those options were good.

No, the good option was he was a healthy human with a bad case of kidnapped, and I would rescue him, present boy to girl, get nachos, and ride merrily off into extremely bright sunlight.

This was going to be terrible. I knew it was going to be terrible. I didn't know how this was going to be terrible, but it was going to be terrible.

Call me Elegy. I'm a spy of the sneaky sort. I dress like a pile of dead leaves, which doesn't help with the boys but does help with the sneaking. I'm a perfectly reasonable five two. I was born outside Washington DC, but you can't get here from there. I was now in Wilno on a bench waiting for the client to show up. 

Bakers in Wilno make this thing that's like a croissant, but they bake ripples of honey and cinnamon into it. They call them flats. Since we'd be leaving on foot, I would need energy, and honey is an energy food. If the client was late, I'd have so much energy I'd have to roll off the bench. 

Luthia arrived on foot in the company of Vincent Valerius Rashak, a lovely man and vampire hunter extraordinaire. The heavens parted and undead-frying sunshine blessed me with infinite light. She was wearing the same long cloak as last night, clasped at the collar. It didn't look like a practical traveling garment, but she was wearing low-heeled boots. They would be fine for a long march. Dr Rashak greeted me, shook my hand, and wished us the best of luck. I was enamored, and barely even noticed he wasn't dressed for walking at all. His jacket and trousers were lean in the Wilno style, but some time out of date. He excused himself. Thunderheads smashed together, and doom rained from cloudy skies. The experienced vampire hunter left. 

"I don't like him," said Luthia.

"Dr Rashak? Why?" I exclaimed, starting for the gates of the city. "He's a wonderful person."

"He passed at me." She sniffed and made a chopping motion towards the southern districts, Satyr's place. I turned my steps. 

"Vincent?" I demanded. "He holding a candle for his dead wife."

"Why would he hold a candle for her if she's dead? Maybe he believes in reincarnation and he's trying to catch her on the next go-round. That makes him a pedophile." She sneered. "And he was making eyes at me. Vile man."

Oh, good.

 

When I'd returned from Bloodharvest, I sent out feelers looking for a buyer for my wheat options. The elves had been very careful, but the thought that I would just resell the options to someone else didn't occur to them. The Truis in Wilno offered me a delightful price. 

The elvish wheat market isn't exactly open. Since they've all been around forever, they structure their contracts to rely on the last contract, which means someone like Trui can't get in. Trui wanted in bad. He would take the options at a loss because they opened follow-on contracts, and I received twelve marks per bushel for ten shipfuls of wheat he could sell at four marks over two. I made one and a half times his total revenue on the deal. A Celephian calling house took the money, cleared it to the city, and I was about to go south and drink something on a beach when Trui and I realized the options contract was a physical document.

I couldn't trade it on my end to his name. It was a bearer contract. I had to hand deliver it to the Truis in Wilno. Well, so be it. Wilno has been a little excitable since the Disagreement and I'm not sure if the moments of activity are aftershocks or warning tremors, but I didn't mean to stay around for long. Besides, I'm fairly sneaky. I went in stealth.

Besides, I'm always curious about what the royal family is doing. They're intriguing, but there's something about Wilno that makes me nervous.

Old Hyrma Trui was sick, so his cousin, Lemrai Trui, met me in their office. He had silver hair in an open donut like a wreath, a very thin face and high cheekbones. He was a relentless ascetic: didn't drink, smoke, or eat 'unclean' food. It gave him a healthy look, but he was sharp, quick, and liable to turn suddenly in conversation. His eye sockets were deep and dark. Since the money had already changed hands, he was worried I'd take off and run, and rocks of distrust occasionally broke the waves of conversation as we completed our arrangement. He tried to act like a deep port, but that water was shallow, filled with reefs of doubt. I'm not sure why, because I came in person to hand deliver the contract. I got receipts for it in duplicate but there was something about Lemrai that worried me. I don't know if I was harmonizing with his paranoia or if the memory of Bloodharvest was still in me. I probably should have ignored it. But I made my big mistake, having Satyr come into witness the transaction. If they wanted to tell the world I had defaulted, they could call Satyr a liar, and one did not remain healthy if one did that to the Last Man Standing.

Satyr had married Baroness Alyssa three hours after her father had died. They'd known each other for years. Before the Ransom Wars when the Consequences of the Horned Lords had grown in power to the point Wilno's survival was at stake, Baron Ozymandias had decided to send his daughter to Celephias. This was long before Alyssa had woken up, and she had obeyed without question. Baron Ozymandias sent half his army to escort her to the far southern port of Meorn, where Celephian ships came. 

Half his army had barely been enough. The Consequences fell on them at the River Gunnen. They had come with horned lords, flesh-eating giants made of discarded slag from mountain furnaces, their flesh pierced all over with horns. Those horns ripped from inside out and cared nothing of where. Ten thousand men and two hundred giants hit Alyssa's detachment of two thousand men. Since the Consequences took no prisoners, only food stock, the men of Wilno fought to the last on a hillside over Jurn Ford.

That last man had been Satyr. At dawn the next day, every other thing on the hill was dead. Iron-bloodspattered statues of antlered giants stood among corpses. Piles of dead men were cemented together by solidified ichor. The giants bleed metal waste, and the gore-spray from killing one could kill with burns, kill by smothering when it cooled, or kill when the impurities within lanced flesh in the initial gout. Satyr rested on a boulder, sword broken, armor torn, and eyes wild when Alyssa crept out of the grotto where she'd hid.

That was the moment of Alyssa's awakening, or at least the start of it. Satyr couldn't do anything himself after the fight. She had to feed him, walk him, get him back to Wilno through land that two thousand men had tried and failed to cross before. She grew under toil. I think words had been exchanged during the trip, but the Baroness and her Consort won't say. They got married three hours after her father died, her in a dress. So she had a wedding dress on standby, just in case. 

Or she was the one who had the old Baron murdered. Alyssa and Satyr had met in violence. They got married in the wake of violence. They were unusually prepared.

Wilno sets my teeth on edge. 

Do you know there's a city in Lithuania called Wilno? That's always fascinated me. Is that a coincidence, a trick of pronunciation that has no meaning? I really want to go there, but I spend so little time on Earth I haven't been able to. I'd like to walk around, see what it's like. Do they have the same tall row houses with steep rooves? Are the streets twisted, are the city blocks round, do they channel rain in the same culverts and pipes that leap from house to house across the city? Is everything connected up top but separated at the ground? Is the whole place so intense, unnerving, and alive?

Satyr came to the Trui's compound to witness our deal. He was a big man in clean armor, with thick dark hair and eyes. I had a hard time getting an impression of him, the person, because him, the armored knight, clanked when he walked and gleamed in stray sunlight. Alyssa ran the political aspects of the city, leaving the Baron Consort to do some of the more social services like witnessing transactions. When Satyr arrived, Lemrai gave me back the options contract, I formally presented it to him, and we both attested I'd been paid and signed the receipts. Satyr witnessed, read our receipts, and insigned them with his ring. He didn't use wax. He heated the signet on his fist and slammed it into the document until his sigil was burned into the wax-impregnated parchment. Then he and Lemrai chatted, vaguely awkwardly, while Lemrai documented the paperwork. I don't think they had anything in common. 

"Have you heard from Dr Seth?" asked Lemrai, sliding the options contract into a cotton envelope. 

"No. Alyssa tells me he is the best. If anything can be done, he will do it."

"That's what I've heard too."

They shot each other faint fake smiles. 

I wasn't getting any animosity between them, but I wasn't getting much of anything at all. Ties of formality were unsupported by human interest. All through their conversation, I got the feeling Satyr was sizing me up. He was aware of me in the manner girls with their first crushes or cats watching wild dogs. I couldn't distinguish the impressions. Once he and Lemrai finished their little chit-chat, he turned and looked full at me. He obviously checked me out, but that was cursory. For the longest time he stared at my eyes like he was trying to see something there. I stared back, and Lemrai Trui tried to turn so invisible he wasn't there.

"A moment, Trui. I'd like to talk with the Astrolagamage here," said Satyr.

Trui opened his mouth, shut it, and took his options contract and went. We were alone. 

Trui's office was ornate and rich. The tile was closely laid, and the paneling of the walls was all joined. There were no nails. Bundles of drapery hung by each window for the winter chill, but now they were pulled back for afternoon sunshine.

Satyr broke the ice with a hammer. "There is a person I deeply and passionately hate. I despise her as a person, and we're political enemies. However I'm not about to kill her and she isn't going to drop dead anytime soon, so I'm left trying to make peace. She's looking for someone of your particular skills. Would you like to meet her?"

"This isn't a sex thing, is it?" I asked. 

Satyr stared dead in my eyes and blinked deliberately.

"I'm just asking!"

"I have heard of you from the elves. They cannot agree to speak highly or low of you, but they do mark you as competent. Pull your head out of your ass. Do you want to take a contract?"

"Excuse you!"

"Yes, I know. You're very offended. 'Oh, no! I endured Bloodharvest, but this man is being mean! Wah!'" Even his armor stank of scorn. "Are we done? Good. Do you want a contract?"

"Who the hell is it?" I demanded.

"Luthia. My wife's sister."

Much like Lemrai I opened my mouth, closed it, and stared at him. 

"What does she want?"

"Knowing her, something horrifying involving some idiot boy."

I stared at him for a long time. His face was still acid and bent. His armor was still sharply polished. I wondered what was going on inside his head. 

But I wasn't going in just for curiosity. 

"Is she rich?"

"I have no idea. But she's a contender for the most powerful sorceress on Pallas, so she can probably rip gold out of starlight or something." Satyr opened his mouth to say more, but shifted topics before the words came out. "I'm disinclined to talk about it, and I'm certainly no party of any deal. She's powerful, she's evil, I kind of want to shank her, and she's looking for someone like you. Now. Do you want to meet her? Say yea or nay, but stop simpering."

Other things being equal, saying yes would probably irritate Satyr more than no. "I'd be delighted."

"Damn," he muttered. "All right. I'll let her know."

As he moved to go, I wasn't sure if I should follow him or not. "Are we going somewhere?"

"I am. You're not."

"Then what should I do?"

"It doesn't matter. She'll find you," he replied and stormed out slamming the door behind him. 

I had gotten deep under his skin. I have no idea what I did. 

 

The causeways charged a toll and required a brief interaction with guards to leave the city via a gate. Wilno spread across seven peaks, closely bundled together under the shadows of Leng, that weird highland that rose almost to the sky. Leng intimidated the mountains under the city, peaks that were tall and proud in their own right, and threw shade on them from its greater vastness. On the east the causeways to Lower Wilno would be wrapped in gloom, but Duncton was good about having beacon fires on the tricky parts. The tolls were fairly spent. 

For all that the causeways were wrapped in shadows, I didn't like shadow in the abstract. I liked it because it kept my movement to me. I didn't want Duncton knowing where I was in his shadows. I holed up in a goat house to wait out twilight, to descend and head elsewhere at moonrise.

I was on a hay bale, spending my money in Celephias in fantasy, when the door opened with ominous slowness. Shadows lengthened across the courtyard outside, and in the doorway a tall woman with black hair and a silver cloak stood. The play of streetlights and houses put her in an aisle of gloom. She carried a wooden lantern, one of the southern ones that burned alcohol. The fire never burned hot enough to sear the wood. She waited with the door open, allowing me to know fully of her presence, before stepping in and putting the lantern on a post.

"Astrolagamage Elegy, the elves call you. Good evening."

"Good evening," I replied.

"I am called Luthia of Wilno. I am a sorceress of the Whitefire Heritage, and I come in powers of Starlight and Silence. You are spoken of in high tones. They say you can rescue someone from goblins."

"They lie a lot," I replied. 

She observed me, a curiously neutral action. "It is said you have three times gone to Bloodharvest and survived, something Bloodharvest is not meant to allow. It is said you have returned from Bloodharvest with elves and a ship made by Brand the Artificer, captained by Phillius the elf, who was captain of Helen's ship Immanence and is now a hermit on the Arsae. It is said he sails a ship in the form of a clockwork dragon you gave him, taken from Bloodharvest. It is said Bloodharvest has collapsed under its own shame for allowing you to escape alive, and now the tower unbroken since Dread, Warlord of Celephias under Kuranes the Terrible, is no more. In Whitefire, your mastery of shadow and stealth is spoken of in high praise."

"That could be anyone," I replied, feeling numb.

"It is said Prince Aehr promised to speak your praises to the world when you rescued a goblin from Bloodharvest, the goblin Othrak. The goblin now lives in the Aethr ro Dyus'My Tirryani'El Rosh'de Feyr Solange, in the palace of Elven Majesty. It is said you rescued elves and a goblin, brought them back from Bloodharvest to the heart of Elvendom, though fate tried to stop you, the sharks of darkness circled around you, and a thunderhead carrying goblin warriors chased you across the Arsae."

I went through all that carefully in my mind.

"Yes," I said at length. 

"Good. I would like to hire you."

"Ah-" I drew the note out until it became its own line of music. "What for?"

"I need someone of stealth, who has done such as you did at Bloodharvest."

"Eh," I said and hedged again. "That was for a mother, deprived of her son-"

"My lover was taken by violence. Doesn't my pain matter?"

I stared at her for a long time. I felt oddly defeated, curiously hemmed in by words. She had shackled me to my own deeds with strings tied to my hands and feet. I didn't want to say either yes or no, but I felt pressed between what I had done and the impossibility that Aehr was somehow worth it and her lover wasn't. 

"I don't know if I can," I replied, which was uncomfortably true and yet reassuring. There was nothing I could do about it if she wanted the impossible. Some of the strings parted as I spoke. "How long has has your lover been gone?"

"Nine years. I have remained true to him for nine years. I must have him back."

That took another good, long silence.

"You-" I paused. "You know he's probably dead?" Probably was an unnecessary word. He was a coffin nail. 

"What is death in the face of faithfulness?" demanded Luthia. She answered herself, "Nothing. But I have magic of my own. I cannot rescue him, but I know he lives. I must have him," she whispered. Her voice was full of aching, terrible need.

"You know he lives?" I repeated. On the edge of ignoring her I recalled that she'd found me, quickly, and I hadn't wanted to be found. She'd introduced herself as a scion of the Whitefire Heritage. Silence and Starlight, right? I hemmed. "Do you know where he is?"

"Death Mountain."

"He's in Death Mountain?" I repeated. "With greatest respect to your powers, he's super dead."

"I know he lives," she replied, her eyes wide.

In the darkness, with the first stars of nightfall rising over the city walls behind her, her pupils were like windows into the night sky. Stars and constellations gleamed within her irises, and as the lantern burned down, her whites went dark until her irises were but auroras of color in a field of stellar magic. 

I looked away for fear she was using her magic on me.

Taking time to think I played with the goats. One of them, a white goat with gray hooding and shoulder patches, moved to me to lift his head for petting. He butted me if I turned to other goats. The others generally ignored me, so I gave all my attention to the goat that wanted it. These were field goats, not pets, and most were unused to human affection. Coarse brambles caught in their fur, tear-drop shaped seeds covered in hooks and acornish things with velcro-like fuzz. Most goats ignored them and me. The one with the hooding was an outlier, but even he got bored eventually and went to a clover bale to search for flowers. He nuzzled through piles of stems for purple starbursts.

I didn't think Luthia was right, but I didn't think she was lying either. I thought more and decided I wanted a way out of this. But how to-

What was wrong with me? I'd just been paid stupid money. I had the easiest escape ever.

"We can talk," I said giving her the Wilno smile. "What kind of financial resources to you have?"

"I am a master of the Whitefire Heritage. My wealth matches the stars."

"I've already used that," I said. "What about cash? Pallas cash, not star cash. What have you got?"

Luthia snorted in a huff and looked disappointed. "I'm telling you I can meet your fee."

"I haven't told you my fee yet, and your blithe unconcern is downright worrisome. I don't care if the best things in life are free, because the worst are all bloody expensive. Now, cash wise, what have you got?" I allowed myself a glum look. 

Luthia stared at me for a long time, with eyes like auroras painted over a night sky. She held eye contact long, and I matched her so she couldn't break my will.

"But money would do me no good," she said quietly. "There are no numbers in your mind, just the word 'more.' That's why you don't set a price, but ask me how much I can pay."

I went white as sun-bleached bones under moonlight. Luthia's watched me with wide eyes filled with galaxies. She laid her gaze against me like a lance. I blinked and looked away.

"You are correct," I admitted, chest hurting. "I respectfully decline. Goodbye."

"So odd," she said out loud, not moving towards the door. "It is said you bargain for great sums of money, yet there are no numbers in your mind. Your deal with Lemrai Trui is almost gone."

"You may go," I said, indicating the door. My heart thundered. I stared hard at the goat with the hooding, who did not return my interest.

"Would you be interested in secrets?" she asked.

"No," I said over my shoulder. 

"I know who killed Baron Ozymandias," she offered.

I started trembling. "No-" 

She cut me off. "Would you like to know where Yre met Hegel, and why she allied herself with him and nearly ended the world?"

One of my hands was shaking, so I made it stop. "That's not really pertinent-"

"Would you like to know where Prince Aehr's wolves are?" she asked.

Um... and it took a while to realize I had hissed out loud.

"One of my brothers is gay. Would you like to know who?"

"Oh, God help me!" I yelled and turned back to her.

Luthia sat down on a hay bale, crossed her long legs, and rocked the tip of one boot. They were laced up the front in elvish silver, distilled from Mathas flowers. She waited, leaning back and radiating command. Her eyes spiraled with a thousand galaxies, and the faint gleams of lantern light on her hair twinkled like stars. She waited.

"I don't trust you," I said.

She shrugged. "I never lie."

I held eye contact too long, and then she had me. 

To seal the contract, she meant me to swear on a bloodstone, and I thought of everything I had ever learned of vampires.

The Blasphemous have a saying: you're bound by what you are. To them this is a matter of blood. Gorat's blood damned them, and they spilled it because Gorat spilled mortal blood for his wars, so they are bound to mortal blood to feed. It's a circular bit of punitive morality. All the Breeders want to be elders and eat their own, but the elders don't want their chylds to become elders, lest they share their food with their food. They came up with a means of binding them. By feeding their human prey their own blood, by blood mortals become chylds, they are bound to the blood that made them. 

Humans are a problem. We're complex, and they couldn't isolate one humor of what we are. They got around it via our words, and they did it with Bloodstones. Bloodstones make words things and bind humans to their words like vampires are bound to blood. Bloodstones don't give a damn about whether the oath is freely given or not. They don't care about whether the oath is intentional or an accidental utterance. Nor is one a fair judge. If Luthia had one, it would serve her. But it was bound by what it was, so it could interpret in her favor, but not conjure meaning out of nothingness.

The stone Luthia put between us was powerful enough to stink over the scent of hay and farm animals. Goats shied away in their pens. I didn't know what would happen if I swore and lied. I didn't want to know. But I was starting to know Luthia. There was a rhythm to her. Luthia lived in the passion of her eyes. I fully believed she'd remained faithful to someone for nine years while they were trapped in Death Mountain. I wasn't convinced this lover was alive, but I was sure she was. I wasn't sure she spoke the truth, but she thought she did. 

Did this random guy even know he was her lover? This could go worse of terrible if not.

I had had those elves over the barrel when it was for money. I couldn't believe this woman had me done likewise. 

"If he's dead and I just get his body, that counts," I said.

"Agreed."

We went over some pleasantries. She introduced the subject as Orweil. Luthia tended to describe him with 'the most perfect ever,' but I gleaned he was taller than her, had prematurely white hair and eyes without the captured stars, and carried a sword and worked out with it regularly. Orweil didn't speak too much; he had a thin nose and pointy chin, and a scar on the top of his head. 

"You may swear in one of two ways," she said as I contemplated the oozing rock. It stank of poor butching. "You may swear to rescue Orweil from Mount Death, but if you use proper names, by your name will you be bound. Since, of course, Elegy is your true birth name, that won't be a problem. You wouldn't lie on a bloodstone, would you?

"But if you'd like to avoid using names, you may swear to rescue one person at my behest. That person is Orweil. I will accept either."

I thought. I thought of Luthia. 

"I'll swear to rescue one person at your behest, but I want to see you in daylight first. Maybe eating garlic," I said. "But I need something else. I need proof."

She smirked. "Granted." Luthia stood up, took her stone, and dripped blood as she laid it in a special purse. She examined her fingers, which were as red as if she'd killed someone, and then up at me. Her eyes weighed me. She took a small piece of crystal from another pocket and wrote something on it in blood.

"This is a mirror imp. It is you, for a little while. It can take no baggage and speak no words, but will go where you will and be seen by who you desire. It eats blood, so be careful." She gave me the stone. "I will meet you tomorrow at noon outside the House of Flowers on Weirgarten Street. Bring what you can carry and nothing more."

I went to have breakfast with the sis.


	2. Murdered Wagon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 9/30 grammar and spelling fixes

As we left the rendezvous and walked south, I noticed we'd been made by at least four agents. I didn't know whose. We entered Satyr's quarter, and I thought we were going towards Gormen Manor, but she cut west around it. This made no sense. Wilno's plateau was accessible only from the east where Duncton's causeways climbed. To the west was nothing but the high plateau of Leng and the river Aph, tumbling down into caverns measureless to man beyond the southern wall. 

Luthia lead around the southern wall and out an old ice cutters port. I saw Satyr watching us from an interior tower, and the Baroness Alyssa standing beside him. There was a frosty space between them. Luthia did not turn, but climbed onto a narrow path that matched the frothing river and climbed. 

"So, where are we going?" I asked once it was clear we weren't plunging into the caverns.

"Up."

"Oh, thank you. That's so helpful. I really appreciate it."

Luthia turned and looked at me. She looked irritated.

"Shall I cross stitch that so we always have directions?" I asked.

She turned and walked faster.

I'd tried sarcasm, and now I was all out of ideas. She would have to take up the conversational slack on her own.

Luthia did not. We hiked up the mountain until the world lay open below. To the distant north the mountains of the Kohg-Doon stood in relief. If we climbed long enough, we could look down on them from Leng. The broken disk of Wilno lay like a bitten saucer. Below it and down the causeways, hidden by the angle of the city, the black waters of Lake Hyades were still too cold for ferns. By midsummer duckweed would cover the lake, and it would look like a manicured lawn. The fishing boats would cut paths behind them as they sailed. Now it was just dark and deep, still water that rarely rippled. The waves ran unwillingly before the wind and faded away in the lee of any stone that allowed them to hide from their work. The village was also subdued. Every building was either a house or a warehouse. Traders wagoned merchandise back and forth, but most of it went out the way it came, without ever going up the causeways to the city. The offices were small, and mere way stations for the receipt of goods and orders. 

"The gold," said Luthia suddenly. 

I looked at her.

"The gold mines of Wilno, their diamonds, the rubies. The assayers and smelters must be close to the mines, and the business offices stay close to the smelters. To say nothing of the ice mines of Gormen Manner, the war college of House Royal, and the many pots Duncton keeps his fingers in," she added. "That's why."

I stared at her for a long time, more deeply worried than before, which was beginning to border on dread. She smiled, not the blankly treacherous Wilno smile, but her own. Now her eyes held sunlight and warmth. Her black hair was soft loam, smelling faintly of shampoo instead of fertile earth, but right and proper beneath the day.

In the silence it seemed I could still hear her smile.

"Silence is my domain too," she said, also out of nowhere.

"Goddammit!" I yelled. "Can you not be creepy?"

Luthia just laughed, and we climbed.

Once else I tried to start a conversation. I asked if her boyfriend was trapped in the Leng highlands. I had never been to Death Mountain, but I knew it wasn't up in Leng.

"No," she said. "We're just getting high enough to see the stars early. We'll leave once it gets dark."

"Leave where?" I asked, confused.

"Leave here," she said. When I did not understand, she said, "Sorcery, Elegy. Sorcery. We are not going to walk to Death Mountain."

With twilight came clouds but not yet stars enough for Luthia. Our pathway wound along the sides of peaks, the lowest places over high kols and coming to way stations on higher shoulders. More than one ridgeline had been filed down from ant's path to roadway. Cliffs fell off on both sides, sometimes into clouds so there was no bottom. The road seemed divorced from ground, a beachhead of the sky, a fortification of stars against the encroachment of Pallas. We stopped on a bald circle, ringed with broken columns like candle stubs, and laid with wide black stone. 

As the stars came out, she put the bloody rock in my hand and ordered me to swear. I'd put some thought into this. 

"I swear to rescue one person, of your choosing, from physical incarceration." Incarceration should give me a loophole out of being bound to rescue someone from actual death.

"Good," she murmured. She thought. "Secrets are somewhat more tricky. I'm not willing to take oaths to reveal things. If I swear to tell you someone killed someone else, that's the secret."

"I do require some form of payment," I replied.

"Not anymore, you don't," she argued and pointed at the bloody stone in my hand. "So long as you like having blood in your veins, you don't require anything but to free someone from Death Mountain for me. However, I do mean to keep my side of the deal."

She held her hand out. 

"So-" I began as I gave her the rock. It had my red fingerprints on it, and she smeared them with her own.

She interrupted. "Duncton. He has three mistresses out of a sense of obligation, and he doesn't know why none of them mean anything to him." She held the bright crimson rock up with two fingers, sanguine smears over rusty red. 

"No," I whispered. I was trying to look disinterested, but since I clutching the corner of the broken pillar between my legs, sitting so far forward that I was hanging like a gargoyle, I think Luthia had guessed. 

She lifted her eyelids lazily and waited.

"Do- do his mistresses know?"

"No." Luthia spoke as if it was a silly question, but her face shifted. In consideration, she seemed to find a depth there. "Marie and Lady Constance don't care. They're not terribly interested in Duncton the man. He has an air of power, he's one of the Baron's children, and he's very wealthy. Neither of those two think much about him beyond what he does for them. He's perfectly capable of performing," she added.

"His third mistress, Madam Heath, is Van's Master of Spies. She's more concerned with keeping their affair a secret, or using it against him. If she can't use him, she doesn't want them to the found, and if she can, she doesn't want him to know. She's also sleeping with Mandrake, so-"

"Wait, Mandrake isn't gay?" I demanded.

Now Luthia did look amused. "No," she replied. Again she considered and replied less wryly. "He's- Mandrake spends a lot of time in his own head. He isn't much interested in people outside his head, which puts him off most women. Madam Heath caught him at a distracted moment, and their affair is easier to perpetuate than end. 

"She's caught between extremes. She prides herself that she's got two princes, but neither one is that interested in her. She doesn't know why. It's amazing the blind spots intelligent people show when men are involved."

"Do Duncton's mistresses know about each other?" 

"Heath knows about both Constance and Marie. Marie and Constance know of each other. Neither Duncton or Mandrake know about each other. Heath doesn't know Duncton is getting bored, and is about to throw all of them over just to cause a scene, and possibly humiliate House Royal in the process. Van seems to be unaware of everything, and he does not take surprises well."

"What about Satyr and Alyssa?" I asked.

Luthia sat on the edge of the pedestal, looking down, and letting starlight fall on her. "There's probably snow down there," she told me. "It's hard to tell snow clouds by the tops, but I think those are."

I looked between her and the clouds. I didn't understand.

"I wanted to be sure that's as high as the clouds come. Prepare yourself."

I didn't know what I was supposed to prepare. I had my satchel, and I was wearing most of my work clothes. Half a dozen knives were hidden on my body, including the Blade of Luthas which I didn't intend to use. I had a couple cloves of garlic and some silver, but no large weapons or symbols. 

Luthia began to murmur, and the wind whistled underfoot. It seeped in and out of the cracks in the flagstones, whistling through crevices I couldn't have put a finger in. Edges of stone warbled. Luthia looked up, and her sharp chin cut the fading lines of her hair. It was the hair I noticed of her first. It faded into starlight, until the sky behind her shone through every strand, but as she turned, she put herself before the great uplands of the Leng and her hair was still full of stars. Moving to the side, I saw galaxies dance around her head. I saw her eyes fill with collapse and explosion of the reincarnating lifetime of stars. Her pupils went supernova to her heartbeat, and she whispered with a wind that had no problems hiding in the stones underfoot.

Gently, the ground lifted. It trembled back and forth like flan in a saucer on unsteady hands, but it rose. I grabbed the candle stump pillar I'd been sitting on, and dropped my butt inelegantly to the flagstones. The wind hissed over my pants. The stones lifted. 

Luthia turned her starswept eyes northwards, and the wind crescendoed behind us. We coasted forward and off the edge of the cliff.

A thousand insect legs of lightning rose from the snow cloud below, and we sank into a skein of ozone and sudden fire. The disk of stone accelerated, and the wind howled. Fast as we went, it didn't cancel out the speed of the wind underfoot. They merely tried to shout each other down. Luthia whispered something, something of the Lord and the Thane, the Galleon and the Air, but she also whispered of Lightning and the Void. We sped up, and mist bled from the rocks like fog from dry ice in summer. It boiled over foot. Insects of lightning danced and threw themselves suicidally from the stone disk, growing as they fell until we cast a wake of thunder. Luthia kept whispering, and the starlight in her eyes raged. Her eyes were galaxies in constant nova, swirling when they should have been torn apart by power. She whispered, and the more powerful she spoke, the softer her words were. 

We tore off across the night until lightning from the snowstorm behind couldn't catch us, and starlight fell away. We moved to fast for anything but the Void that came before, and into the Void the stone disc fell. Sideways and north we fell, and Luthia whispered in deepest Silence. 

Some time out of Wilno, the clouds began to thud angrily against a high wall to the north of us. Several great peaks rose in a line that faded on either side with their arms thrown over each other's shoulders. Their capes fell into misty valleys. Luthia raised us to get over, but the disc scraped the sky, and inverted wakes of stardust and lightning crashed down behind us. We shook and dove. The ground lifted towards the great wall, and Luthia put us over a hairline road that climbed the mountain's curves. We rose again and tried to sneak upwards between the sky over mountains like a blanket tented over a body. It was so close. Thunder danced from rock to stars. We creeped up to the tiny notch of the pass over Gorat's Interdiction. On the other side we saw the Well of the World and Death Mountain. 

The Interdiction formed a ringwall, and at the center rose the spire of the Bier. It was a broken pyramid at the center of the ring, not so tall as the Interdiction but shear. From the misting bottom of the well twenty thousandish feet of one peak stabbed up from a basin. The floor of the crater was thick with mist, but here and there pierced with bright gleams. A skeleton lay against the Bier, feet cocked against the feet of Gorat's Interdiction, and head against the spire. Its cold, empty eyes saw nothing, and its hands were wrapped around the rusted blade of a sword driven through its chest. That skeleton was four or five miles tall, and it lolled against the mountain. 

I could smell it, too. Stale death. Old. It wasn't a charnel house, but it was there, something off. It smelled like ichors, burned flesh and leather, charred hair. The smell boiled out of the cauldron over Gorat's Interdiction and flowed in stink down to the mountains, forming a heavy layer of air that smashed the clouds down. Over the ozone I'd caught premonitions of it, but I had to clench my teeth now. 

Shapes like birds circled the handle of the sword. They circled, landing sometimes on the sword-hilt, and picking at the skeleton. Their bodies were indistinguishable dots, but the wings were long flapping arcs. I couldn't be sure. The sword handle was high enough it played tricks with the light, and scattered rainbows out of a clear sky. 

Luthia's stone carpet skipped twice on the roadway, and she screamed to jump. I did as she lost control. The disc wobbled and rolled, bouncing over the edge of the interior face, and plummeting down the endless wall. My contract fell as well, hit and rolled, and nearly went off the edge. 

I picked her up, and she didn't seem harmed. We looked down on the impaled titan sprawled across the mountain below. 

"Death Mountain," I said, trying not to breathe. 

"Let's go."


	3. Intermission I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 9/30 Grammar and spelling fixes

Shortly after his meeting with Luthia, Satyr sent word for Lemrai Trui to join him at Gormen Manor. This was only a few hours after their last meeting, but Trui arrived punctually. He met the Baron Consort at the main gate. Satyr held his reins as Trui dismounted, and the Consort lead him in and up to a high conference room in the sprawling house.

The conference room was a misshapen thing stuck between two preexisting walls. The north wall bulged in around the outer circumference of a tower, and the south wall sprawled wide at the base and cut in at the top. The other wall wasn't terribly straight, but bellied outwards like a fat man to form a roughly square room with more ceiling than floor. It was warm, had three fireplaces, and the thick walls broke the wind away from the tall windows. In places the laborers had seemed to insert windows after giving up trying to fit rock. Baroness Alyssa was balancing a pen on her nose when Satyr thumped the door and walked in before she could respond.

"Hello," she said, rising, and looked curiously between him and Trui. There was a partially eaten tray of crackers, cheese, and fruit before her, and a huge stack of forms. She also had an ink tray, wax plate, and signet ring and candles. 

"Good evening. I'm trying to head off a rumor. Alyssa, Lemrai Trui, Lemrai, my wife Alyssa." Satyr came in and sat down by her after a brief, perfunctory hug.

The Baroness looked briefly at loss for words, but Trui bowed and said, "So good to see you again, Baroness."

"And you, Lemrai."

"Oh," said Satyr. "You two know each other?"

"With Hyrma sick, Lemrai has been taking his seat on the grain council," replied Alyssa. "We're good friends."

"Beautiful," said Satyr.

"Why are you so mad?"

The Consort snapped a few times angrily and pointed at a chair. "Trui! Preempt them. Tell her what happened."

Alyssa looked flat footed but invited their guest to sit as Satyr had indicated. Trui looked distinctly uncomfortable as he accepted.

Trui spoke swiftly but completely about his meeting with Elegy. He explained the nature of the contract with the elves, and he and Alyssa went on a side tangent about tax burdens involved. Their conversation was a rehash, and they started and ended in agreement. Both seemed satisfied the other recalled the outcomes of their previous battles. Lemrai then spoke of Elegy's arrival, and explained that in light of the origin of the rumors about her, he'd been concerned about their contract. Elegy herself had invited Satyr to witness it.

"Why were you nervous about her?" asked Alyssa. "She's spoken of highly."

"Yes, my Lady, but she's spoken of highly by the stranger in yellow."

Alyssa thought about that and nodded. 

"Lord Satyr graciously came to witness the contract and exchange. I have a copy if you'd like to see it," he continued, looking up. Alyssa nodded. The grain merchant passed her a sheet of paper, and she parsed it, glancing once to her husband. He shrugged and indicated the paper should speak for itself. She perused it and gave it back. 

"And after that," Trui continued. "He asked to be left alone with her for some time. I left."

Alyssa nodded. She didn't have much expression on her face. 

"Were the curtains open?" asked Satyr.

"Yes," replied Trui instantly. "In fact, several of my people watched them talk."

"They watched us talk alone, in an office, about business. But we talked alone in an office, so rumors are going to get around." The big man pointed at her. "I'm doing the right thing. That's what happened, and when some .... person says otherwise, you won't be surprised." Person was a word in the bottom of the barrel, and he rejected several other terms reached down for it.

"So you had a meeting, in an office, with a woman?" asked Alyssa. "There were witnesses."

"Yes."

The Baroness looked back and forth between the men for several seconds. 

"I feel like I'm missing something," she said finally. "Is your office a bedroom?" she asked Trui.

Lemrai stared at her blankly. "No?" he ventured finally.

She did not look surprised. "Why, then-"

Satyr snapped, "Because this is Wilno, and I can't eat an apple from an apple cart without someone spreading rumors I'm plowing the apple girl!"

"What are you talking about!?" yelled Alyssa.

"Exactly!" yelled Satyr.

"Um, ma'am," interrupted Trui. "Lord Satyr- Ah- the rumors Lord Satyr speak of exist. "

Alyssa squinted at him. "There are rumors Satyr is sleeping with an apple girl?"

Instead of answering, Trui threw his hands up and declared, "I have nothing to do with these rumors!" 

"It's exactly what it sounds like," said Satyr. "It's stupid, but I'm being the bigger man and ignoring it. What I don't want is you hearing this unexpectedly, so I'm giving you battlefield intelligence."

"What apple girl?" repeated Alyssa.

"The girl by Morning Street. The one with the little cart. You know her," said Satyr.

Alyssa looked at him blankly.

"She's an apple girl! What does it matter? She's just got the best apples, so when I'm in that part of town, I buy from her specifically. People say dumb things."

The Baroness looked to Trui for confirmation, but he refused any participation at all.

"Oh. You've never said anything about her," said Alyssa, taken aback and unsure how to respond.

"I haven’t," agreed Satyr. "You don't like apples." He pointed at her fruit plate.

Alyssa followed his finger to the sliced apples laid aside as if she'd never noticed them before. 

"I'm not against apples," she argued faintly. 

"Eat or don't eat apples if you want," said Satyr. "But Wilno is full of rumors, people are morons, don't get ambushed by stupid gossip."

"If it bothers you, why don't you get other apples?" the Baroness asked. 

"Because I'm not going to let those sons of whores and daughters of bastards win!"

"It dawns," replied Alyssa and caught her stride. Tension fell off her like an old cloak. "Lemrai Trui, thank you for the courtesy. I appreciate it greatly. Will you be at the next two-sided table?"

"I will, but I must ask it be brief. I'm trying to capitalize on this option, and time is wasting," said Trui.

"I understand. Feel welcome to send a representative if necessary, and of course, you’ll exercise discretion about this conversation." The Baroness nodded. 

“That has always been my intent.” Trui nodded back, rose, half bowed, and left. The couple was left alone.

"I don't hear any of those rumors," she said.

"That's because you do actual work," snorted Satyr. "But I know some people get bothered by such things, and I didn't want you surprised by stupid and untrue rumors. If I'd known you don't hear them, I wouldn't have told you."

"No, no," replied Alyssa. "You can tell me anything. I understand you're being kind, and I appreciate it. Thank you."

The armored man grumbled. His seething induced a small choir of clanks.

"So what did you two talk about?" asked Alyssa. 

Satyr looked at her irritably and moved his tongue in his mouth as if some caught piece of food bothered him.

"I wouldn't ask in front of Trui, since you obviously meant to keep it private, but you must expect me to want to know now after you've brought it up." Alyssa wore her most reasonable expression, and against it her husband's irritation smashed in impotent fury. Looking at him, she saw him decide he couldn't refuse to explain without making this a fight, and she watched him discard that idea. Satyr's face was marvelously expressive once she learned to read it.

He sighed. "Word's out Luthia is looking for a spy. I put her in touch with Elegy."

The windows were closed, but a bitter wind off Attaxis blew through the room.

"You're having private meetings with Luthia?" asked Alyssa, who painted a bigger and bigger smile across her face until it looked like her head was about to fall off.

"Ah, god's blood," muttered Satyr.


	4. Dip a Small Toe in a Cold Pool First

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Edited June 18, 2017
> 
> 9/30 Grammar and spelling fixes

A foliage of swords came within a meter of the crest. The highest was almost visible from the outside, a two handed flamberge driven into the dirt almost up to the hilt. Flanges on either side of the broad crosspiece were supposed to lift to protect the hand, but they drooped towards the interior walls of mountain sunstone. The metal might have melted and formed tiny waterfalls at some point in the past. It was rusted through and swayed in the winds of the pass.

Knives clustered near the roadway down, itself steep enough to cut a line down the inside of the Interdiction. Broadswords spread across cliff faces with weeds of rapiers and cutlasses. I saw scimitars and claymores. The weapons obeyed no law of form or function, not even size. Up here, by the crest, most were human sized. I could have pulled one out of the ground and wielded it. Deeper in the basin fog formed a low surface over rainforest, pierced here and there with gleaming steel. Gorat's Interdiction was the outside wall of the Well of the World, the center of which rose in the spike of Death Mountain, and crosses of buried swords lined the walls. 

I made Luthia wait for daylight. She wanted to push on, but the night was dark. Neither moon nor stars rose. Only a white slash like a galaxy marred the sky, but that radiated no light. Luthia would have gone down by feel; impatience was on her. We argued for a while, but eventually I won. I curled up under a two-hander, and she sat on a boulder overlooking the well. I felt sheltered, as if danger was close but blocked away.

When I dragged myself up the next morning, Luthia handed me a plate with bread, apples, and a salted sausage. 

"Breakfast. Eat." 

The sun hadn't crested the Interdiction, but sunlight was washing the sky. No, not washing, fading. The sky was fading, like fine-dyed black clothes left outside for many years. That white smear of something lost distinction as the sky around it bleached itself to daylight. It didn't bleach white, but a glorious, deep blue. I wondered if to a dyer a dark enough blue and a black are the same thing. 

Luthia was having none of my thinking.

"Eat. Daylight's burning."

 

Emptying into the basin like a faucet onto a splash plate, the road was almost a cliff coming down to a platform lifted on brass feet. Flagstones sank into metal without rivets but throwing up ripples. I stepped expecting brass waves underfoot. There were none, just hard metal and stones. 

The air was thick down here, almost soup. It was hard to breathe. Away from this pasture of armature, the trees erupted from thickets of greater swords, some dozens of feet tall with grips bigger than my body. Trees climbed them and vines threw webs of creepers across the armory. 

If the Well of the World was a clock seen from above, the titan's legs were the hands at four and six. We'd entered from almost nine, and descended in a long counterclockwise circle. It had felt like a sleigh ride, but that was only a mark of depth, and we were heading north west, not far past three, when we'd come to the basin. At twelve the Interdiction was notched with Heaven's Gate, a kol between the highest summits through which red Aldebaran could be seen at midnight if not for the clouds. They streamed in now, a waterfall more vaporous than usual, but surprisingly normal in the way it cascaded down the mountain, plumed up over rock and sword, and formed the ring pool at the base of the Well. Those were God's Tears, the only saltwater rain on Pallas I believe. The incongruous beach smell washed away some of the old stink of death. 

At the landing we switched back and headed south. Coventry emerged from the inside face of the Interdiction over the titan's left ankle. The cathedral city rested on soaring buttresses that looked suspiciously like manacles. This impression was not helped by a road that shot south from the basilica's feet and rested on similar buttress-manacles over the titan's right foot. Outside the titan's legs two great bridges leaped to Mount Bier, crossing several miles of chasm full of saltwater rainforest. On Bier they joined tiny cities, huge in any reasonable sense and tiny next to the titan. Rising shadows had overcome them, and now only windows and fires implied they were there. The one on the right, three o'clockish, was Cassan Tun, and the left, at seven, was Dramm Gorban. They meant, um, heck, old Whitehall Goblin, singular excluded-case with an n, so-

"The Scabbard, and the Purse," said Luthia.

"God-" I screamed and caught myself. "-is a good guy, and stop doing that!"

Luthia cocked her head sideways and smirked at me, radiating smug. "Let's discuss how we proceed," she said, and we stopped to talk. 

The sun was setting behind a wall of black peaks, and to the east the inner cape of the Interdiction sparkled with blades. We would have to run to beat the shadows. They were now at Death Mountain, flowing up the monstrous Bier towards the skeleton, and more worryingly around the Scabbard and Purse. Those cities were small, bright lights against the darkness. Nightfall reached the bridges, and fingers of it cast from the bones of the titan scrabbled towards the far city. But we didn't run. Twilight receded from heaven, leaving a white smear on blue returning to black, and Luthia wanted to talk. 

"Titan's Prison is in the skeleton's rib cage." She allowed herself amusement. "Orweil is in there. All you need to do is sneak in, find him, and get out."

"Why don't you come?" I asked, the thought occurring suddenly.

"Because there are no stars down there, and my power is that of starlight and silence," she replied. Before I could ask, she faintly lifted her head. "That's the Blot, and I can't use it. But through Heaven's Gate I can see Aldebaran, and that's enough. Once I know where to look, it's enough."

So be it, I decided. I had a few other questions, but mainly I didn't want to go into the dead skeleton. No one ever hired me for fun jobs anyway. I put my work clothes together: reeds and grass into the stray belts to break my outlines, face paint to distort my silhouette, turned my cloak to gray. The strapping and cinching was a familiar ritual that brought comfort. When I was done, I stood like a ghost among the fallen swords. Luthia turned tired eyes to me.

She was much taller than I. She had better posture too, and the last two days had impressed with her confidence. But she was also exhausted. There's a limit to what strength of will. I doubted Luthia had slept well in a long time. 

"I'm ready. If I come running, do you have something up your sleeves? Will you be ready?"

The artificial sarcasm cracked. Luthia was one of those people who was too cool for me, and she allowed herself to be amused. However her cynicism was filled with pits and holes, and the small break that allowed me to see her exhaustion widened into something very like absolute truth. 

"Bring me my lover, and if necessary I will rain fire until the gods weep."

Her eyes were wide and full of stars. 

I nodded.

Of the things I trusted Luthia to do, waiting and watching to save her boy-toy was number one. Hideous sorcery was number two. We were at the highest point this trip's trajectory was going to hit.

"Be ready," I repeated, for me not her, and walked across the bridge. 

 

 

Movement over the bridges was timeless and eternal. The Well played games with perspective, but step after step the bridges seemed to extend within. Each footstep was a moment, an undertaking, and tight as I was wound, each step took a long time. They fatigued me like I was climbing. Footstep followed after footstep on the coverless, concealmentless, desolate road. I paused to look over the side and smelled salty rain into thick vegetation.

There was a lower level of clouds beneath God's Tears. Both were raining, but the first rain hit the second layer of clouds more than the woods. Pillars like roots hung from the ridgetop, and dug through clouds and foliage. Deep among the canopies the trees climbed the stonework, but higher up the salt water cleaned the creepers from the stone. Above the lower clouds, the bridge was coated in pure white crystal. To the south the long bones of the titan jumped the ditch, and its knee was still held together with shreds of rotting matter. Ahead of me Mount Bier was a desolate rock beyond merely barren. The huge corpse existed to remind me there was something worse than no life. Walking towards it my breath felt stollen from my nose. My throat went dry, and if I licked my lips, I tasted only dry salt. 

I kept walking, and when the sun was not just set but gone, when the stars had failed to rise and the dark was again everywhere, when Dramm Gorban lit up like a crowd of dark faces before me with torchlit eyes and bonfire mouths, all pressed together and shouting, I walked into Death Mountain.

One step past the bridge I passed from night into sunshine, and the weight of afternoon hit me hit me like a waterfall. Day pressed me. Birds rose from soft moss in gentle patterns, hopping or flying between tiny outcroppings of brush, and bees bumbled between tall flowers. Death Mountain was eclipsed by creeping banyan and juniper. 

And the flowers! Roses climbed daffodil stalks tall as horses. Cherry trees dropped blossoms like snow, piling up drifts of white velvet. Everywhere was blue, white, yellow, and red in petals, stems, and pistils. They drifted with the wind, and a sharp gust urged an avalanche of loose clover and lily to crash over hills of rhododendron. That wind blew on, until the indigo rocks of the rhododendron cast dovetails of equally indigo clover, and the tiniest buttercup petals broke loose into froth. Bees had to chase them, tiny barrel bodies flying after flowers like delicious soap bubbles. I couldn't help myself, and lifted my head and opened my mouth to catch a tumbling azalea on my tongue. It tasted like honey.

I stared up, tasting honey, and kept my eyes closed. I tried to track the sun with my face. For a long time I didn't put any thought into it, and a bee landed on my nose. I felt her six little feet putter across my face. I had to spit the flower out, and accidentally opened my eyes as I closed my mouth, squinting against the sun. But there was no sun.

I stared up for a bit.

There was no sun. The sky was a perfect expanse of blue.

I kept staring.

The sky was exactly a perfect expanse of blue. It was absolutely perfect. All of it was blue. Every bit. The exact same shade of fair sapphire. 

I twisted and looked at the horizon. I could see Gorat's Interdiction, the regal line of peaks, but the sky wasn't whiter above them. The sky wasn't darker straight overhead. There were no traces of cloud. There weren't even little streamers of blown snow spun from the white heads of Gorat's Shieldbearers like mostly bald men on windy days.

And there was no sun.

Something good and happy in my heart died a little; some piece of it shrank, and the quiet Elegy in the back of my head began to worry.

I looked down, and for the first time realized there were no shadows. None of the flowers cast shade. The ground, where I could see it through seething pools of dandelion and heather, glistened in perfect sunshine. I actually crawled under a weigela, pulled aside tiny clover, and made a tent with my hands around my eyes, my nose pressed into warm, soft loam. I could see perfectly. I could see everything. 

Quiet Elegy began to speak up a little louder. In the gentle ambiance of the fields, she sounded loud and clear.

I was dressed perfectly to blend into any shadow. I was not a riotous calamity of color that didn't contain shadows even within itself.

"Oh, geez," I muttered, and I crouched down behind the azaleas.

Out of morbid curiosity I assured myself that I couldn't see if I closed my eyes. That was something. 

For a while I listened to the pasture and isolated bees, birds, and mammals. Then I listened through the locals to hear wind and the beat of stem on stalk. When I could filter out that, I heard drips of water and rock, and deep beneath that, in the realms of sound that required my eyes shut and silence in my head that submerged even thought and impression, I heard screaming, shouting, and something I would bet my Elvish pay-off was bone hitting flesh.

I opened my eyes and followed the sound of violence.

 

"Oh, Elegy, why are you so grumpy all the time? Why are you so paranoid? Why are you always looking for the rainstorm behind the rainbow?" I muttered in goblin through paradise. 

The plateau under Mount Bier itself was a generally roundish prominence. The ring of deep jungle that the bridges crossed hit two of the higher headlands, and I slipped off the crest to avoid casting a silhouette. Going south I passed under the immense two-part arch of the skeleton's left leg and turned into it, heading towards the basket of the pelvis to follow the fighting. This saddle funneled echoes better than the bridge headland, bringing more distinct smashing and breaking. Someone screamed in either rage or agony. If there were words, I lost them. 

Two low hills were easily crossed, but the second dropped me into a couloir that ran with filth and muck. It stank with all the death and rot that the flower gardens didn't have, flowing in slow black slime. It was a disturbingly familiar smell. If someone gets it from behind and the blade pierces their gall bladder or kidneys, all that crap and bile comes spewing out the anal cavity. I sniffed a few times and tried to ignore it, but the way up ran next to the filth river. It glistened in brilliant sunlight. I edged to the top of this draw, staring right up the skeletal chasm of the titan's pelvic cavity, and saw two people trying to kill each other.

Chastain of Jorgan stood ankle deep in muck. He burned from the foot to knee with cool blue flames. Sometimes those fires danced to his bloody hands, but mostly they smoldered around his legs, hiding like children behind their parents. 

Rebecca of Celephias ran circles around him. Small rocks barely broke the limit of the black sludge, catching her steps over a shimmer where the sludge reflected only sky. They both wore armor of a thousand knives, beaten into plate and chained together with ropes of daggers. Rebecca's long red hair was pinned back with tiny rapiers, and Chastain's forearms were tattooed with scale-mail of cleavers. But her teeth were blades, and his blunt fists hung like resting hammers with lines of burned blood up and down his hands. Her mail was tight at the hips and breast, and movement opened intimating gaps in the plates over her skin. 

"Three times I ask you, under the law of Coventry," asked Chastain, turning to keep facing her and kicking swirls of filth in the process. "Lay aside and go."

"Three time I refuse, filth. Don't cry again."

"Blood surrenders to Bone, Rebecca," said Chastain, but she was freed of some burden by denial. On her next step she missed the rock, and stomped hard into the black stream of mire. It splashed overhead like it was driven from earth to sky. She stepped onto the ballistic droplet rising from the center and rode it upwards.

Chastain swore and shot his feet wide, settling. 

Rebecca soared until she was framed by the skeleton's birth canal and fell running at the man, dashing from black droplets as she went. They burst in rainbows under her feet. She fell like angels into Chastain’s fist, and the thunder of that impact was as much fire and blood as sound. It spun her over backwards while her lower body kept falling, and she splashed into black filth, throwing up a curtain of muck. 

Within the black veil a second splash erupted in blood, and Rebecca was no more.

The blood-splash burned in ichor, and by the time it landed, it was only smoke and dust. It brushed against Chastain's face but did nothing else. He looked oddly at the foam cluster where she had landed, hands still up in a boxer's guard, and said, "Oh, Rebecca, why?" and "You deserved it" in sharp, whipsawing connection. His face wavered from kind to harsh. He shook it off.

Turning towards the skeleton, Chastain walked uphill and grabbed something I couldn't make out, something human-sized but hard and coarse. It looked like a giant cocoon. Chastain heaved it up before him and carried it in a bear hug, but he couldn't walk with his knees hitting it. Next he lifted it sideways in a bridal carry, but only a few steps on, his shoulders wavered, and he nearly dropped it. One edge splashed into the mire, and he leaned into the cocoon as it leaned against him. He looked back quickly, caught himself, and turned to the burden. After a moment, he swung it around up and onto his shoulder. Then he had to walk fast, knees shaking with each step, and trotted quickly towards Dramm Gorban. His back wiggled with the weight. 

I had no idea what to make of this. Neither goblin city was visible from here. I guessed Chastain wouldn't let himself look back again, so once he was toiling up the hillside, I left cover and darted across the rocktops to where the fight had been. Of Rebecca there was no sign. The muck wasn't that deep here, so her skull or hips should have been visible. I saw nothing.

I hemmed for a moment, seeing nothing towards Cassan Tun, and only the killer laboring Dramm Gorban. I considered the immense skeleton. It rotted geographically slowly, and I didn't think it was going to do anything interesting while I watched. I glanced between the two cities again and followed the living. 

 

Back the way I'd come, the battlefield was concealed by a line of low hills. The flowers and foliage concealed the both the fight and the smell, and I flitted past Chastain, around a low buried mound to be by the Dramm Gorban when he arrived. This is the first time I’d seen it, and like Death Mountain, it caught me by surprise.

The goblins had built a mountain. They hadn’t built a city inspired by a mountain. It wasn’t a mountainous keep, a keep on a mountain (well, it was that), or a mountain of a keep. They’d built a mountain. It was a little mountain. It was seven, eight hundred meters tall. 

The primary summit jutted up from the foot of Mt Bier with watchtower-massifs on north, south, and east. Rampart shoulders spread out, notched here and there with passes, protecting the central crest. On the east, great stones had been piled up to form an escarpment that soared hundreds of super-vertical feet. Up close, the stones were laid with mortar and gray cement. They had hardened under a coating of something black and foul. A gatehouse toe poked out of the long robe of the south face, little more than a couple of high spires and a portcullis. Rivulets dumped rainwater into channels that ran to the forest, and armored couloirs were protected with terrible boulders, edged in obsidian glass. 

“Who, the blazes-” I said out loud, and head-Elegy replied, “Goblins. Next question.”

Well, yes, I guess. I nodded to myself and took my hiding position. 

Carrying the body-shaped burden, he stumbled up and tried to ease it down. It slipped and smashed against the ground. Before he could grab it or knock, the gate swung open and several sword-clad people rushed out, looking back the way he'd come.

"Who was it?" demanded a man.

"Don't know," said Chastain.

"Tramman!" snapped a woman, and that was how I learned his name. I'd learn she was Remeigh the same way. "Chastain, are you injured?"

"No, no. I'm fine. Just tired. I got the birth."

"You're bleeding!" yelled Remeigh.

"Oh, yes. I told you that if you cut your feet and wrists the blood burns when it touches the ichor. That way the mire can't poison your skin. I told you that."

"You're bleeding, Chastain!" yelled the woman.

"But I'm not poisoned!"

She looked like she wanted to argue, but Tramman, indignant at being hushed earlier, pushed past them to heave the 'birth' up on his shoulder. He got two steps alone before several other people pushed out the door and assisted him. They wouldn't accept his refusal, and four people carried the cocoon-shaped thing inside. Chastain told Remeigh to leave him alone, and when she tried to bandage his wrists, he ducked inside the city to get away from her. I seized the opportunity to sneak in behind.

 

The goblins of Dramm Gorban had dealt with the problems of lighting by hoisting everything that glowed overhead. Goblins, of course, don't see contrast well. They see fine during the day or in dim light, but shadows are impenetrable to them. When a goblin sees a torch, that light becomes a bonfire and everything around becomes black. The featureless brightness outside didn't make it in, leaving a dragon's horde of shadow and gloom. All the corridors and rooms were ten meters high with lights marching along the apexes of the chambers. The ceilings of Dramm Gorban were copper, giving an omnipresent and featureless light from above, dimmer than the outside but similar, and laid over stone and metal, not flowers. 

I'd catch most of the names of those within before leaving the Well, and almost everyone of the twenty or so who waited inside the gatehouse. The bravest were Tramman and Remeigh who went out first, she from concern and he from a belligerent defiance of fear. Morryn, west coast lowlander by the name, was one who went out after to help carry the birth and had been joined by Tief and Albert. It was good to see an Albert being quick to help but I always like Celephians. Their names are familiar. I couldn't place Tief. She might be from Jaggerfall, but Tief isn't a terribly Jaggerfallen name. 

A few meters down a fortified entryway people mobbed Chastain looking for answers, and when he couldn't escape, Remeigh pounced on him to bandage his hands and heels. He fussed at her, she ignored him, and the rest badgered him with questions. The three on the birth hauled it elsewhere into Dramm Gorban's depths.

"Who was it?" demanded a red-skinned Cutlander named Jass. He was shorter than anyone here, with a long sharp nose and tufts of ear hair. Like everyone in this fortress his clothing was patterned on blades, much of it metal, and he wore sandals, thonged with gripping leather and soled in scabbards. 

"I didn't catch her name," said Chastain.

"So it was a woman?" Jass continued. 

"Oh." Chastain paused. He stuttered for a few seconds. "Yes, I guess. It was hard to tell."

"They're not women!" interrupted Tramman. He was big, taller than anyone else with a sunrise on his back. The core was many finely laid throwing knives nestled so close together that they shone as one and extending rays of rapiers. As he raged, he gestured fast, sending a rattling and clacking from his armament. "They're not men or women! They have no blood in their veins, nor hearts to pump it!” 

"That is true," confirmed Remeigh, working.

"They look like men and woman," grumbled Jass.

"Not important. I don't think of them," said Chastain. "How about you? Did they try to snatch anyone? Did they succeed?"

"Oh, they tried," yelled Tramman, and suddenly many people talked at once. The soundwall drowned out details. I observed two fierce agreements: that those of Cassan Tun had tried, and that they had not succeeded. Chastain seemed relieved as those who had remained within the city leaped quickly to talking about the failed attack. Accounts varied. It was either a probing assault or scouting mission, but everyone took it seriously. I couldn't tell if the now bandaged fighter was as serious as they to encourage the distraction. His hands and feet were now big cotton balls, and Remeigh wanted him to sit down and elevate his extremities. She looked like she was going to get her way.

While I waited for the crowd to dissipate, an iron portcullis dropped behind me. For an indecisive moment I hesitated between escape and remaining, but I waited too long. The steel barrier sank into notches in the floor. It was a dozen odd swords, rapiers for giants with long fine blades three times my height and intertwined cross guards of steel. Among them were knives and shortswords, heated until they flowed like wax and woven among the vertical shafts. Every apex was a cross. Once the doors were shut, the crowd outside got into an argument. Tramman and several agreers were labeling Jass and his faction as being argumentative, and they shouted about who fought more than whom. Jass disagreed at volume. Since they weren't going anywhere, I scouted the entryway for escape and observed the murder holes in the ceiling.

The murder holes weren't barred, but writ with, "Do Not Enter" in iron on the frame. I didn't care what I was forbidden to do, so I climbed through.

Above a ethereally-lit workroom contained winches and rope, a good supply of wood and kindling. By each murder hole stood a pair of spit holders, and a cauldron sat nearly. They had long spouts to reach the pour point while remaining over a firepit, but weren't mounted on the spit holders yet. I sniffed one: oil, soot, garlic.

I breath laughed. 

All right, I thought to myself. That's the lay of the land. Rebecca was a vampire, and Chastain knew her. It was probably something evil; I figured they'd been lovers. But Chastain's a Wilnish name, and Rebecca Celephian, so its possible they were kin. Celephian names are popular in Wilno. He obviously wasn't too happy about finishing her, but as Tramman had said, she wasn't human any more. There had been no bones after that hit, and her teeth had been knives. 

I shrugged in the empty room. The fight had unsettled me, and paranoid Elegy was still unhappy. But I felt like I had the nub of an explanation.

They talked about Chastain's burden as a birth.

I went looking for it.


	5. Eating

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Edited Jun 18, 2017
> 
> 9/30 Grammar and spelling fixes

I had never been to Death Mountain before, a streak I was not enthused about breaking, but knew it from both reputation and rumor. Death Mountain isn't the sort of place one comes without reason, and there aren't a whole lot of good reasons to come here.

It got the name from the skeleton, and I'd always thought had been exaggerated. Likewise, I'd thought its history was mythic. It was a prison of the gods in the old world. They came up here to the heart of Jaggerfall and hid their demons in the mountain: vampires, ghosts, yth. It was said they were given to the evil dead with indemnity, that those of malice could vent their hate on the evil forever. I wasn't sure who were supposed to be the jailers here.

And here I was.

On the mundane side Death Mountain was just obscenely hard to get too. The southern tip of the Doon reached to Wilno, and on the east stretched lowlands between the Hyades and the Solange. Before the terrible Ransom War the Horned Lords had sometimes visited those lowlands, and on the other side of the Doon lay the goblin nations. The elves had built roads on the crests where deep-breathers had difficulty going. They laid their paths across summits and built bridges over passes. Just in case the myths were real, the elvish roads passed above breathable air. Walking to the Well of the World was fatal. 

No one I'd met had been here either, and the places I picked up rumors were generally old libraries. Even among the isolated natives of the Jaggerfall, this place had an evil reputation. It was isolated and lonely. Therefore I was surprised when I did find two people pushing the birth along on a wheeled cart and one of them was singing a song currently popular in Wilno. The cart was low, a flat shelf barely above ankle height, but it had triangular handles on either side. They were straight up near the back and sloped downward to the front, and the singer and his irritated coworker were each pushing one. The cart wiggled on unlubricated wheels. 

"Johnny's got two shirts--, only got one shirt on, Johnny bought a second shirt--"

"And I will shove that shirt down your throat if you don't shut up!"

There were several seconds of indignant silence.

"That was unnecessary."

Near the gatehouse the walls had peculiar bare patches that looked like cleaned bloodstains. I'd climbed one to get out of the foyer. Further back in the castle, I could see they weren't bloodstains, but root marks that had been scraped clean. Ivy with tiny white leaves and berries the size of peas grew through the keep, long tendrils stretching out of cracks in the wall mortar and tiny creepers hanging off the walls. Some places they were obviously scraped away and cut back, and in others, behind columns and under ornamentation, they lay thick as dust. Obviously someone tried to clean them away regularly. Now they indicated where the unnoticed spots were, and made the slow process of picking shadows to hide in quick. The goblins may have tried to eliminate shadows, but ivy found them.

With their help I was able to move much quicker than my usual creep, and got within listening distance of Tief and Albert.

"Either stop singing or sing a DIFFERENT VERSE!" yelled Tief.

Tief was definitely Jaggerfallen. They yell parts of their sentences, and they're always a bit twitchy. She was as short as I was but bigger-fit. She looked like a fighter. Her muscular legs filled her breeches and stretched the fabric taut over her butt. She wore two layers to make her shoulders look small, a thin silk shirt with long sleeves and a tighter vest over top. Her hair was back in a messy ponytail.

Albert wasn't Celephian. I didn't know what he was, but he didn't have their swarth or brown eyes. You find Celephian names everywhere, though. He was a good foot taller than me, blond hair, green eyes, and lean: not twisted lean, like Phillius the elf who'd been stretched on the iron rack of Helen's evil will, but runner lean, climber lean. He sang like a runner, with a heavy beat that came down every other breath and little regard for correct note placement. 

"No," said Albert. "I will not be a hostage. Johnny bought a second shirt--"

There had been a third laborer earlier, but she was gone now. Gee. Did she not want to hear the intricacies of this delightful, shirt-based discussion?

"NO, we are not DOING this!" Tief's staccato yelling jumped octaves, and Albert raised his voice, singing over her. Her voice went shrill as she tried to get over him, but Albert took the song low into vacant registers. The trundle of poorly oiled cart wheels squeaked between them.

"--And left it on the lawn!" He breathed. Tief waited. Tension boiled between them. "Johnny's got two shirts--, only got one shirt on."

I'm not saying I would have done it, but if Tief had knifed him or something, I would understand. 

The shriekers wheeled the cart down a hallway and onto a broad, circling ramp. 

The thing is, I already knew that song. It was a bar song in Wilno. Johnny's lawn-shirt gets stolen, he is sad, and instead of buying a third shirt, he goes to town and has a drink. Everyone was singing it. 

A big difference between Pallas and Earth, to me one of the biggest differences, is the prevalence of professional music on Earth. Most everywhere on Earth has a radio or jukebox, something. There is no recorded music on Pallas except in clockwork music-boxes, so in bars and taverns, if people want to listen to music, they have to sing it. Great songs stand on their merits, but songs that are decent when sung by bad singers thrive. They explode in popularity and usually die fast.

How could someone in the Well of the World possibly know a current bar song in Wilno?

They circled down the ramp, trundling slowly to shouts and singing, and I chased them in bursts of speed, running from ivy-wrapped crevice to another. We went down four levels and should have been well beneath the surface. Ivy thrived on the ramps. The ceiling of each ramp above was outside of cleaning reach, and the bronze lanterns fed it infinite light. A long arm in from the central well the underside of each stairway was clean stone, but one pinky's reach beyond a thick carpet of fresh green and old brown creepers covered the ceiling. 

The singing and yelling changed, and on the next circuit round, it stopped suddenly. A shut doorway marked the circumference. With my ear to it, I could hear the cart's squeaky wheels but nothing human in utterance.

Doors frighten me. You can't sneak through a closed door. Silence could mean watchers, and there's no way to tell. They could be looking. But I could hear the wheels, and Albert wasn't singing, Tief wasn't yelling, and they had the sarcophagal birth on a cart inside. The need to know climbed up my spine and caught quiet-Elegy from behind. 

I darted through quick as I could and dove for green shadows. 

This room was uncleaned of ivy. It was an indoor jungle, packed from wall to wall with leaf and stem. It looked like an algae filled pond. Roughly circular, the far wall was an arrowshot away and the ceiling arched overhead with lantern constellations dispersed across it. The floor sank, which I could see because Tief and Albert were trundling down a long, sloping aisle among broken columns webbed in with vines, but the foliage maintained a flat surface above them. I was reminded of the Arsae. The shorn tips of the columns crested the leaf-line like the goblin crests. 

For the first time I felt relatively safe, and that made me paranoid. 

I darted among the brush beside the pathway and found a good watching spot when the two brought their burden to a clearing at the center of the room. 

By the time they got to the center a large owl flapped out of the ivy and landed on a toe of stone, looking at them. It was a magnificent bird, brown and gray, that merged with the green plants like a ghost over troubled water. It stared at them with large gold eyes. After a moment, another appeared, smaller and black, with the same gold eyes. The two birds ignored each other as they perched on the same rock. A third arrived, white and tan, and shoved the other two aside as it pretended they weren't there. Soon several hundred of them ringed the clearing on stone and branch, each of them intent on believing they were alone.

Albert licked his lips, parted them to speak, didn't, and licked his lips again. Tief stood very close to the cart and birth.

A tall woman in silver appeared. They referred to her as Pearl, and I noticed her when she stood at the edge of the dais.

Pearl wore a collar of silver plates, linked with obscure little hinges that let the wide necklace contour her breast and shoulders. From it hung a dress woven by nothing I've ever seen. There were no seams, and it followed the shape of her sides and the taper of her legs, save only where it bunched up on the top of her hips. On the back and thighs it was sheer almost to being mist, and I could see the dimples over her buttocks. Over her breasts and between her legs, it thickened. It was woven opaque there, but the extra threads vanished in hints and reappeared without indicating that two pieces of fabric were joined together. Pearl's eyes reminded me of Luthia, for they were full of stars.

Tief looked taken aback and fidgeted. Albert looked mesmerized. His head tilted sideways, and he didn't speak. Tief looked to him uncertainly and noticed him lost. Her head-gears started ticking. Only when she was about to say something did Pearl speak first.

"Do not look, Blasphemer. You can't have me," Pearl said to Albert.

The man blinked like a sleeper splashed with water.

Tief lost her train of thought and shot a glance sideways at Albert. He shook himself and opened his own mouth when Pearl demanded, "Break the sarcophagus."

Again forestalled, they paused for a moment. Pearl thrust tools into Albert's chest, and he reflexively took them. He looked like he wanted to say something else but turned around in silence.

She'd given him two chisels and blunt-headed mallets, and he passed a set to Tief. They went to work in a practiced fashion, working first on several protruding excrescences on the sides before moving to the main body. They sloughed off several hundred kilos of mass before their main attack, opening a hairline cracked along the major diameter. At each spot Tief or Albert worked just enough to set the chisel tip before moving to the next, and between them they scored a long, shallow cut along the birth. It looked even more coffin-like now. Having started talking between themselves, albeit just work directions, Albert and Tief put their tools to the apex points, which they clearly recognized at a glance and looked exactly the same as the rest of the organic, crusty rock to me. It looked brown and swirled with softer earth tones, and I tried desperately to think of something it resembled more than a petrified turd. Nothing came up. They called a cracking tempo, and in percussive harmony, tapped, then struck, and finally slammed their chisels with increasing power. Pearl watched and smiled darkly. Galaxies spun beneath her black brows.

Tap, tap, bang! and the birth fell apart.

Albert immediately stepped back, right into my line of sight, and now I wanted to knife him. I couldn't see what was happening without moving, and the plants around me were suspiciously dry. If I moved through them, I'd have to look down and pay attention to that. 

"Birthed of power and old god's might, brewed of rotting blood, fathered of bile, mothered dead, rise," chanted Pearl. Her words dripped smug. She was so pleased with herself the incantation was almost purred as she gloated in magic.

Tief made an unimpressive 'eep' noise and scampered sideways. Something moved.

"Dead you came into the world, and alive you burrow beneath it. Blood of ichor, bones stone, and flesh iron, rise," sang Pearl. Her smile gleamed.

That something moved again, and a thing like a hairy boulder shook into view. Albert retreated again and blocked even more of what was going on. 

"Uncreated, ill formed, with fungal soul on a divine corpse, rise," purred Pearl.

The thing sighed and slumped forward. I got the feeling it had to roll sideways to sit from lying down, and now reached out to put its hands down.

"Rise," gloated Pearl.

It rose. A bull headed mountain of human flesh rose until Albert didn't block my vision any more. He barely blocked the small of its back. The thing groaned and stood as tall as goblins. Unlike them, it was broad and red skinned, with short coarse hair that rippled as its back moved under rust-red skin. It had a head like a buffalo with great horns, and the body and shoulders of a man. It stank of human waste and metal. I scooted sideways to see around Albert's back while they were distracted by the giant bull. 

"Rise," whispered Pearl.

"I am risen," the bull replied in the language of the gods.

Oh my god, I whispered and hoped desperately I did not say.

Godspeak cannot be learned, but anyone can hear and understand. It is the tongue authenticated fanatics. They speak and are heard by all for the language burrows into the ear and mind with the will of the speaker, ignoring limitations like sound and noise. The minotaur spoke in a faint Chicago accent to me, with hints of old TV and the DC suburbs' melting pot English. Tief whispered in high-trench Jaggerfallen, something about evil and curses, and Albert swore softly in Malice. Pearl did not. Pearl nearly crowed. 

An owl landed next to me, and while the echoes of Godspeak clung to leaf and stone, asked me, "Who?"

Pearl's head snapped up, her self-satisfaction momentarily paused. "What?" she demanded.

"Who binds me?" demanded the bull on stone.

Pearl looked away for only an instant. The bull stretched, and muscle flexed like retreating avalanches. Pearl tried to stare down the bull from her ivy-wrapped pillar, but shot glances at the owl and foliage. 

"I am Pearl of the Whitefire! I demand your will!"

"Who?" repeated the owl of me.

"Shhh," I hissed at the owl.

"I refuse," replied the minotaur. "And defy your power."

"Pearl, you need take care of that," suggested Albert quickly as he retreated equally. 

"Silence! Bull, I abjure-"

The minotaur smote her with an iron hand and smashed her from behind her words. The sorceress flew, smashing pillars into fragments and agitating the owls. They took to the air in a heavy sound, many thick blankets falling onto a bed.

"Who!?" demanded the owl.

"Fool!" screamed Pearl from underneath a flesh-shattering pile of wreckage and called lightning from the lanterns. A wave of blue light flashed at the horizons of the room, rushed together, and peaked at the lantern of the North Star, a brilliant silver thing directly overhead. A column of power like the hand of God dropped out of the artificial sky and slammed the bull to his knees.

Albert and Tief turned and ran. The owl snapped its head forward to snap and me, and I ran from the bird.

"Cretin, obey me!" screamed Pearl. Her words cut holes through the deep echoes of the bull's words. 

"I refuse," he said. Something like breaking rock crackled, and some great impact shook the floor.

Tief dove outside, and Albert was right behind her. Pearl's parliament of owls chased me. They had unnaturally large and unfriendly claws. As echoes of violence shocked the air, I chose to dive outside as well, and made it just as Albert slammed the stone door. I hit the ground in a pile and found Tief's knife at my neck.

"Who're you?" she demanded.

"Saleswoman," I replied. "Want to buy cookies?"

She hit me on the head!

 

 

I woke up tied to an altar like a sacrifice. Chastain, Remeigh, and the others from the gateway were here. I'd been stripped and put in an altar-girl uniform, a white smock thing. They'd taken my shoes, knives, and bags of dirty tricks. I could move my head and noticed my neck was over a little basin in the granite altar that had a channel leading to a pour spout facing the congregation. They were talking about Pearl. I did nothing to draw attention.

"Of course something unexpected happened. Jass, matters rarely go wildly and blindly wrong on schedule. We can assume Pearl's plan didn't include step H, 'Things get terrible here.'" 

Remeigh, who'd treated Chastain's injuries, sounded like she was lecturing Jass. The little Cutlander was indignantly silent. He had the look of someone who's only listening so he can respond. Tramman nodded sanctimoniously. The rest of the crowd had bifurcated and were either muttering angrily behind Jass or respectfully agreeing with anyone who agreed with Tramman. 

"But don't you think it's a little improbable that Pearl, Whitefire from Coventry, happened to lose control of the binding at the exact moment a living human appeared? I can hear her pulse from here, so we know she's not a phantom, but the only women with pulses in the Well of the World are in Coventry, which is exactly where Pearl is from," replied Jass. His crowd agreed in shouts and anger.

"But that doesn't matter," said Tramman, who had waited until his opponent had spoken with an air of martyr. "It doesn't matter where she's from. Let's just eat her."

"Yes!" demanded Tramman's side in equal parts hunger and indignity.

No, I thought. Bad idea, Tramman.

"We should torture her first!" yelled Jass. "She's the enemy, and must suffer for it."

Not better.

"We're going to torture her anyway," said Remeigh, looking between the both of them. "Think of the slow agony as she realizes she's going to die. Think of what she will feel when she realizes this is the end, that she will see nothing else, meet no one else, and every unsaid thing, every unfixed mistake, and all her errors will outlive her as a monument of failure after she's dead. We'll kill her so she bleeds." She licked her long, fine teeth.

Jass and Tramman considered and agreed. They approached me with a knife. Their respective crowds pressed together behind them, fighting not to merge and fighting harder to get to the altar. They shoved and pressed. Something like electricity jumped through the air between them, and they began panting, hissing, and several stumbled to the ground to walk on hands and knees. Others yanked those up violently, and they jumped forward or threw punches. 

In the moment Jass gave a filleting knife to Remeigh, I thought of Jay. I thought of making jokes about this moment. The difference between joking and now was the difference between knowing and understanding. It's the same events, but I was different facing it.

A door opened, and another man appeared. He was white-bearded and tall, mostly bald but not from his great age. From the very crest of his head spread a spider-web of lightning scars that dug through his hairline like roots of old trees. They crawled down his face from the bridge of his nose and stuck to the crevices beside his nostrils before tunneling under his beard. Furrows in his mustache rose over the scars before they sank into thicker hair by his chin. On the back of his head they ran as thick as river deltas to his high collar, and from the neck down he showed no skin. In one hand he carried the blade of Luthas. 

"Stop," he ordered, and the vampires did. "What is this?" he asked me, lifting the knife.

"A long story," I replied.

He weighed me. "You would say that now."

"Do you know the name Luthas?"

He stared at me even longer before asking the impatient crowd, "Who caught her?"

Some muttering yielded, "Tief and Albert."

"Where are they?" asked the old man.

More muttering yielded they were not present.

"So they caught her, didn't kill her, and turned her in for a feast they wouldn't be present for?" he asked. There were hints of doubt in his tone, like Luthia hinted at being boy-crazy.

"Yes, that is what seems to have happened," said Chastain firmly, cutting through a babble of argument.

"Why don't you find them, right now?" suggested the old man, and his words flexed against them. Fully thirty of them stood against him, and the air strained towards a hidden breaking point.

It did not reach. One by one, the denizens of Dramm Gorban filed out and left, Chastain and Remeigh going last, and I was left alone with the old man and the knife of Luthas. 

He pulled a chair up, smiled, and sat down. I had the weirdest realization he could probably see down my dress, but his old eyes held mine. They were clear and blue with deep whites behind scabrous spectacles. He was in remarkable health, and he held the blade like a snake neck, right behind the head. 

"As a matter of fact, yes, I do know the name Luthas," the old man said. "Who are you, and how did you come to possess this knife?"

"I got it in Malice," I replied. "I had gone among the frozen thanes on a mission of subtlety. Opal and Onyx were at war, and I was to creep into Onyx's cellars, dungeons under Old Malice's fortress, and free Opal hostages."

Nodding, the old man rose and took a bronze plaque from the wall. He used it with the overhead lamps to put a smear of gold light across my thigh. 

"-Which is when, in the torture halls of Onyx Tellebor, I found Luthas who was shackled to a wall. His presence was being used as maddening fear," I continued.

The old man stared at me, long and hard at the curve of my thigh as the gold light played over it and licked his dry lips.

"-So I said I would free him, but demanded a ransom-" I spoke even faster as he stepped forward.

He put the bronze plaque on the altar, propped against his torso, and methodically pulled the glove from his left hand. Burns ran from his coat cuffs to each fingertip, tracing the patterns water would take in a shower. His bare hand reached out, settled on my leg above the knee, and eased upwards past the altar dress. Blistered fingertips brushed close shaven stubble, and two fingers pulled the skin over my hip taut. He licked his lips again, his thin tongue parting his teeth, and with his other hand, the one with the knife, he lifted up the bronze. My legs cast a shadow on the altar through the flimsy cotton dress.

I lost my train of thought, but the old man wasn't listening anyway. He held three things, the bronze sheet, the knife, and me, in two hands and ran out of breath. 

He looked down, salivating, and I looked inwards, hesitating. Neither of us moved. Then he put the bronze between his body and the table, drew his rough hand across my leg to push the fabric down, and I started babbling something when the knife hand flashed. He stabbed between my thighs, and arthritic knuckles on strong hands slammed my knees. I froze again.

He had snatched my shadow off the altar and severed it from my flesh with the blade of Luthas.

"I deserve just a taste," he whispered. "I've earned it. I deserve it."

And the old man ate my shadow. He slurped it down, thick wet slobbers that consumed shade and darkness. My black self wiggled and fought, and mere thrashing did nothing. He ate with hands and teeth in a disgusting mess. Before the shock wore off, before I knew what he was doing, he was done.

Remeigh stuck her head in. "Master Orweil! We've found Tief! She opened a side gate for the Breeders while we were distracted!"

"Then kill her!" he yelled back, taking a half step towards the door. He looked back at me, at Remeigh, and at me. 

"Priorities," he reminded himself and took off running with my knife. 

"Oh, my God," I whispered when they were gone. It wasn't pain. Nothing hurt. But something was missing. I starved, hungered, craved, and it wasn't there. My lungs were empty, and I couldn't breathe. If I was underwater, a ship had crossed between me and the sunlight, and now I was in the dark underneath it, and I thought of my shadow.

Who had ever noticed? Who cared? But now I didn't have one, and I was going to die.


	6. Lovebirds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Edited June 18, 2017
> 
> 9/30 Grammar and spelling fixes

Chapter 5 Lovebirds

Goblins had beaten in the edges of bronze bowls to form wick holders. They stored oil in the center and above each chandelier they put another bronze plate, beaten unevenly and colored by old smoke. Light was broken by the rough scoring of the plates, falling in overlapping weak circles. Lying on the table I could see light on my nose, but not which chandelier happened to cast it. I could not see the shadow of my nose on my nose, but maybe that was just angles. 

"Orweil, where-" demanded Pearl's head as she stuck it through the door, but no one answered. She looked around the room. "Oh. You."

Nothing she had to say was my business, so I tried to ignore her.

Pearl walked in. She had the mother of all bruises on her right side, and through the tease of her dress, I could see it rising from broken skin. Bad motorcycle rash looks like that, like a cheese grater was taken to her skin. Having taken in the room, she ran in and sniffed me with wide eyes and an evil smile. Whatever she smelled disappointed her. 

"Ah. They've taken your shadow already. Damn. That would have saved me a great deal of time. I'm pleased to tell you you've failed. I bound the bull to a name of my devising, and I've no intention of revealing it. Either you aimed to steal him or interrupt the ritual, and either way you've been defeated."

“I was rather hoping you’d die,” I replied.

“Ha! A bull without a binding kill me?” She snorted. Then she paused. “Well, you’ve obviously failed there too.”

I shrugged.

Pearl was irritated to get the last word so easily. “And you would have lost the bull’s name anyway. All of them.”

“That was never the plan. No, this was just a hit.”

“A hit? That’s a damn waste! No one would be that stupid.” She snorted again. “Who ordered you?”

I shrugged, giving her the last word again.

“Was it Emerald? Someone from Malice? Does it regard the throne?”

I went back to searching my nose for a shadow.

“You will tell me,” she demanded and grabbed me by the cheeks and chin, twisting my head to look at her. I closed my eyes, and saw a bright patina of light with halos and floating shapes. 

Ah, I cried. 

She grabbed my face and tried to pry one of my eyelids open. I thrashed out of her hands but couldn’t escape. She snatched my head again, but I was stronger than she and pulled away. She had to lean forward to reach me across the wide altar, and I had enough freedom to jerk to the far side of the slab. That stretched her out, and she didn’t have the leverage to get a hold on me. But she wasn’t tied down. After a moment she clambered onto the altar to grab my face. She’d been graceful on foot, but less so crawling over a fighting person. I nearly threw her, but she sprawled out. 

“What- what are you doing?” asked a befuddled Albert.

She froze, and I jerked free.

He gasped. “What happened to you? Your side?”

“Nothing!” spat Pearl and dove off the altar. 

I cracked my eyelid and spotted her, turned sideways to him. Her left was elegant and smooth, with the curvature of hip and breast teased behind the phantom gauze. White fabric was barely there over her dark skin. Albert was in the doorway with his heart in his eyes, head settling to the left and a wistful expression, but that competed with curiosity. He wasn’t too far gone yet.

“I’ve come for the assassin,” said Pearl, authoritatively but in jerks. She spoke at a weird tempo. “This one tried to kill me.”

“No, she didn’t. When?” demanded Albert. He stood up straight. 

“In the- don’t argue with me!” she snapped. She paused and took a deep breath, a movement on a girl like Peal that nearly deflated Albert. Her voice dropped an octave. “Albert.”

Albert’s head went sideways. “Yes?”

Pearl said, “Albert, I’m going now. It would please me to speak with the prisoner later, but I have to go. Good bye.” She departed 

He looked after her and looked at me without seeing me. “It would please her greatly to speak with you,” he said at me. I wasn’t really in his world. “Ah well. Maybe she’ll come back.”

Albert walked out the door he’d come in.

“Albert!” I yelled.

A moment of nothing was followed by his head reappearing. “What?”

“She wants you to break me free, and take me to her, so she can interrogate me,” idiot.

Albert had a slow stare-off. “That does make sense.”

I nodded supportively, like I was helping him. 

“Hey, why-”

“Because if you leave me here, I’ll be eaten by vampires.”

He stared into space again. “That is true,” he admitted.

I nodded again, supportively. 

Sometimes I feel bad that not-lying is such a surprise. What is my life that when I tell the truth I feel guilty?

Albert remembered to keep my hands bound. He undid one, made me clasp my hands together, and put chain links around them. The chain cut deep into my wrists. Once done he tied my hands to my foot, undid everything, and put me on a leash. I was less concerned with the indignity than I was with the sounds of fighting that echoed dimly through the corridors. We went down. 

Long halls looped off ours, circling and coming around. Dramm Gorban was a snake’s nest. We ran over cold floors, and I sprinted up on my toes. We heard metal slamming metal above as well as a peculiar hissing that slithered behind the echoes.

“Chastain’s down,” said Albert suddenly. He was behind me, and I caught nerves in his voice. “They picked their time well. They must want the birth.”

“Why didn’t you send a group to the skeleton for it?” I asked.

“Because there are not so many of us as them. Dramm Gorban has many windows and doors, and we must keep most of our people there to defend it.” In a different thought, Albert added, “The birthing ground is hard to leave at speed. If a fight goes badly, no one escapes. One can fight many times but only die once.”

“And you?” I asked.

“I don’t mean to die at all.”

Round and down we went to Pearl’s door.

On the far side the floor was colder, and owl droppings made walking treacherous. I stayed on my toes. This made me realize how short and thin the altar-girl robes was, and if Albert wasn’t staring into the foliage pie-eyed, I’d have tried to cover up. Couldn’t they have tried to sacrifice me in a parka?

Heading down the long, sloping ramp set on either side with ruinous brush we saw first the owls. They watched with broad eyes. Even in the directionless goblin light, fires danced in their pupils, and they rustled on their perches. Many demanded, ‘Who?’ in knowing tones, sure of the answer but wanting to hear it.

Further the stones were broken. Here and there five-fingered impact craters marred smooth granite. Some radiated spiderwebs of cracks, but others sank into rock like mud. I inspected one, and saw perfect impressions of a fist as big as my head. Even the knuckle hair was preserved in stone. The overgrown columns lay broken, and one broad aisle was scoured of ivy. Someone had dragged something across the floor hard enough to rip the ivy roots out of their crevices. In other places cylindrical holes were burned to the ground, and the vines hadn’t the time yet to grow over them. I didn’t know what would burn through the plants like a pillar of fire like that, ignoring stem and branch to bore for the ground. 

Albert was walking faster, his shoes clattering on the ground. His knife-mail had tufts of hair from the belt leather between scales and extended in several layers to his feet. He looked warm.

He caught me looking and snapped, “What?”

“Because a parka would provide an armature for clotting, and that’s exactly what your kind doesn’t want!” I spat before my head caught up to my mouth.

Albert looked confused. “What the devil are you talking about?”

“Nothing. What are you talking about?” I demanded.

Albert made a weird face and turned away. 

Pearl’s growing hallway was full of owls and empty of sorceresses, so we left. Instead of going back, Albert urged me towards the far side of the hemisphere-domed chamber with a click of the chain. I bit hard on my irritation. This was not the time. I couldn’t hear fighting, but the owls could, increasing their fluttering to jump from branch to branch. Their cries grew agitated, and several fluffed up, staring at the door. They formed sideways bowls of feathers. 

The back door to Pearl’s chamber was broad and hung on top-side hinges. It was a sheet of bronze larger than a bed, frozen around a fist. Something had hit with such impact and heat the bronze had deformed, yanking down on the sides and up on the bottom. Seen from beyond the door looked like a ghost or a sheet laid over a dog sitting in the middle of the bed. Between us we couldn’t move it, but the hit had drawn the bottom up enough to shimmy under. 

I thought about waylaying Albert as he crossed, but I wasn’t sure if I’d win. If I did, I didn’t know if I’d win quickly. I didn’t know what waited on the far side. My hands were still chained together, linked to my foot, and the owls hooted unhappily at things we couldn’t hear beyond the door behind. 

At what point does caution become hesitation become fear? The moment passed.

We went on.

Beyond was not the work of goblins. This corridor was unpolished brutal stone. Instead of flagstones laid evenly, the floor lifted and dropped with the cut of chisels. The ceiling was a mess of chasms following the grain of the stone. There was less light here, patches of luminescent lichen that grew in sconces, and drips from watering the lights reached blackly down the rock. 

“Keep going. Hurry up,” urged Albert as we stood up beyond the bronze, jingling the chain insistently. It sounded fake. I didn’t test him, but I decided he hadn’t been here before.

That gave me an opportunity, so I set out quickly. I didn’t pull ahead, but I picked our path and he wasn’t confident enough to correct me. At each blind intersection I went down, and he grumbled, sometimes telling me which path to take after I’d taken it. Every time he ordered me to do what I’d just done. If I said anything, I agreed. 

We came to a corner turning hard to the right, where the inside wall reached towards the outer elbow. It was narrowest point so far, still twice my arm span, and the far side of the left wall was lit with red glow. Albert paused, and tried to hedge as we approached, pulling back on the chain. He held it uncertainly. I let him stop me once, pulled forward, and he jerked a halt again. I seriously considered jumping him then, but in irritation I darted around the corner. He hedged as I pulled, dithering along behind me. We passed the corner. 

There we found Pearl on a stonework throne with ebony silk and ornamented with owl feathers, drinking black wine and waiting. Her smile purred.

“You came,” she gloated.

“Yes!” declared Albert.

Damn, I thought. I didn’t want this.

Pearl rose from the fan of owl feathers. The light was all on her left, intense at the source and casting a fog of shadow. She looked glorious, and the bits of gauze on her body that caught the light glowed. She beamed at Albert, and put her wineglass down beside another.

I looked away. The chamber was neither regular nor empty. Ox-headed men labored around us, carrying burdens of stone from deep chambers beyond Pearl’s throne. They carried them out a long chamber to the left, into a brilliant circle of daylight, and cast their rock outside. I saw mist, smelled salt-water, and felt the kiss of wind. Minotaurs carried boulders down that path, walking into an orange eye of sunlight, and their trudging forms were black from behind, the many of them blotting out the light to form a pupil. At the end of the chamber they hurled their stones into the ring-canyon at the bottom of the Well of the World and trudged back along the sides of the cave.

They were bigger up close. I didn’t know how Chastain had carried one. I felt very small as one trudged by on heavy feet. His sides were knitted to his hips with bands of iron muscle on level with my eyes. His ox-head was bigger than my torso, large even for his giant’s body. I figured they were taller than goblins. Unlike goblins who have long, thin limbs that move quick as shadows, these bulls moved like rolling stones. 

I looked back. Pearl had drawn Albert to her and lifted his chin. 

“You brought her to me,” she whispered.

“Anything for you.”

“That’s so nice of you.” She put her fingers to his face, cleared the hair from his eyes.

Be foolish if you have to, but learn eventually, I yelled in my head. They were ignoring me, or at least pretending to. It was time.

I put myself in the way of a returning bull and held out my chained hands. He stopped and looked at me. I jerked my wrists apart, not hard enough to make a rattle, but enough the chains stopped them. 

“You have beautiful eyes,” she told Albert.

“I should tell you that,” he replied.

She smiled, one hand on his hip, one teasing his face. Albert put his hand on her side, and it rested on the top of her hip. She shivered in her dress and pulled the fabric tight. Now his fingers lay on the rounded crest of her buttocks. Her other hand went to his face as his went to her waist.

“Do you think my eyes are beautiful?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.”

The bull I was facing didn’t understand. I jerked the chain a few more times. 

It finally got the hint and took my wrists. For a terrible moment I thought it was going to rip my hands off, but the bulls leathery fingers enveloped my wrists from hand to forearm. With a clean snap it pulled my hands apart. Left with steel bracelets and a few links on either side, I was free of the chain. The bull grumbled and walked off, and I figured out how the chain and manacle was threaded around my ankle. I could, if necessary, still pretend to be bound but not yet run.

“Do you think I am beautiful?” Pearl asked. 

“Oh, yes.”

“Do you speak truth, freely and of your own will?” she added.

I froze in my inspection, for those were words of power. I looked up. Albert’s hand on her injured side had pushed past the flayed skin to her pristine buttocks, and his other clenched her side. He was lost in her. Both her hands cupped his face, thumbs on his cheeks below the eyes and fingers back over his temples. 

“Oh, yes,” he repeated. I don’t think his brain was capable of any other words at that moment.

“Does the sight of me drive your heart?”

“Oh, yes.”

My head was absolutely silent, but I suddenly went to work unthreading my chains in furious haste.

“Do you speak truth, freely and of your own will?”

“Yes.”

Ah! The bottom clasp over my ankles had a hidden spur, one that fit between the links. I couldn’t see it standing up. I unthreaded my right foot and moved to my left.

Fear and curiosity tapped me, and I glanced up at Albert and Pearl.

“Good,” she whispered. She pulled her hands back so they touched his cheeks and brows, and drove her hands into his eyes.

Her fingers tore into flesh, cutting through the skin and reaching knuckle deep in his head. Albert gasped, going almost immediately into shock, but he didn’t drop. Surprise kept him upright. Pearl bent her fingers and cupped his eyeballs from the rear, and he moaned, a tiny little sound of terror before pain. With a jerk she pulled his eyes out of his body. The left one came easily, but the right squirted out of her fingers on a tether of nerves. She tossed the loose one into her wineglass and used both hands to rip his other eyeball free.

I looked down, unchained my other foot, and ran like mad for sunlight.

 

I was done with this contract.

Orweil had eaten my shadow, and I’d be damned if I was going to save him. I had not really wanted to take the contract in the first place. I’d been curious about Satyr and the royal family. That was my fault. But curiosity ends. I was no longer interested. Luthia could boil, all these denizens of the Well could rot together, and Pearl, whatever she was, however she was connected to Luthia, was to be left to her demise. Hopefully the Cassan Tun vampires would catch and kill all of these people, and in the violence, they themselves would be destroyed. If any lived, they would be confined by Gorat’s Interdiction and its proliferation of crosses until the end of time. 

In any event, it was not my problem. I was gone. I was going to a beach where I was going to research best drink-umbrellas until I had a statistically significant sample size. It would be my magnum opus. Long after I was gone, researchers would hold up my work as the definitive study of cocktail-shade quality.

Why in God’s name had Pearl taken his eyes?

Not my problem, I thought. I ran.

The bulls generally ignored me, and their movements were predictable. Proportionality put surprising speed in their slow steps, but toiling under their burdens of stone, they rarely noticed me. None moved to block my path. I raced to the eye of sunlight. 

Emerging, I was hit by whipsaw emotions. First I rejoiced in the feel of warmth on my face. One by one the bulls carried their immense burdens to an edge of the tunnel. It opened onto space without a hand rail or even lip; the coarse stone stopped at a termination into nothing. But yellow and amber light fell on me, and it was incredible. A bull hauling stones as large as a wagon stepped to the edge and heaved them over the side. They vanished into the high ring of saltwater clouds without a trace as he turned back. 

Watching him go, I happened to look down and saw I had no shadow. I crashed out of delight, into remembrance. But a moment later I saw the next towering minotaur cast no shadow either. I remembered the flower-field, and recalled there were no shadows in this place. Perhaps mine waited for me outside.

I scrambled onto the cliff-face and climbed the dirty bluff until the first yellow buttercups hid among rocks and dirt. Clover appeared between them. Soon I was among the sea of color, and so many colors rushed at my eyes they flooding into warm white. The earth was green underfoot. 

I made it to the bridge, stepped across, and hit a wall of daylight.

There was no gentle transition. My foot touched the worked stone of that bridge, and burning agony hit with the fury of the sun. My skin burst into flame. My white prisoner-dress exploded. In an instant I was screaming. It burned, I burned, the world burned, and I forgot how to stop, drop, and roll. I didn’t even think about it. I thought, Oh God, Oh God, I’m on fire, Oh God, Oh God.

Purely by accident, I ran back across the bridge the way I’d come and fell over screaming in pain. I lost consciousness under red azaleas.


	7. Mirrorwall

Chapter 6 Mirrorwall

I woke up and asked myself, “Self, what the hell are we doing here?”

I didn’t have an answer for that.

The sis is actually the sister-in-law, but I call her sis because I like her so much. This was not always the case. When she first met Calvin and they started dating, I was not sold on the girlfriend at all. She was not mean but cold. 

The first time I met her we spoke through a cloudy reflection pool in Black Water Isle where I’d acquired beautiful dreams. This Celephian harbor abutted the Black Downs, a labyrinth of textile mills on the coast. The auction houses and looms ran up hill in three fingers along the three channels of the Northshore River, each one with its wheel dipped down. None of the fine wooled blacksheep or clovis goats could be seen, but I’d heard a few still lived up by the Academy. The weather was grim. Sun and stars had been hidden for a few days with heavy cloud cover, and the bay was curiously still. Out to sea the waves were tall and militant, coming in ranks against the shore, but once they crossed the submerged ridge that demarcated the craterous Black Water Bay from the Celephian Sea, they refracted around the isle and smashed against each other in unorganized melee. On a tall tenement I saw the pure blue-green of the ocean and the filled blue-black of the bay in contrast. The sky couldn’t decide if it wanted to rain or not.

I had bought the dreams from a kid from Malice. He was a refugee with dark skin and a shaved head. He hawked on the street corner, hustling the crowd and generally getting nothing for his efforts, until I’d noticed the silverwork around his neck. I’d asked him about dreams, and he told me he had the best ones. I’d asked for proof. He took me to a hut on the side of the road, doors open to the crowd. It hadn’t looked safe but only reasonably treacherous. One didn’t come to Black Water Isle with delusions of security.

Inside the walls held the usual assortment of crap dream catchers with fluffy feathers on beaded string, and he tried to sell me several. They were complete garbage. I asked about the silver necklace again, and he tried twice to redirect me towards crap. I stayed strong.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, losing his edge. He grabbed it again in a moment. “Of course! I’ve got them. The best. You can’t imagine. Dreams of a young man. The world is still in front of me! I’ve got everything. I’ve got the dreams.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Let me see them.”

His trail of babble slowed, and he took the necklace off. It had two silver crescent moons on small leaf hooks. Where the shadowed moon should be were ebony pearls.

“These any good?” I asked. My finger tingled like static on a dog when I touched them.

“The best, the best!” he replied. I couldn’t tell if he was selling or answering.

“How much?”

“A thousand over two,” he replied.

I was quiet. In the wrong places, I could get these for two marks each. In a Mayfair storefront, they would run one hundred marks each. That was a place with reputation to guarantee quality. 

“I’m Elegy. What’s your name?” I asked, still examining the pearls.

“Femblem.”

Femblem. A strong Malicious name. “You’re from House Iron?”

“I’m from Celephias,” he stated, absolute and slow, unlike the fast babble of his sales pitch. I thought of rocks in the bay standing out of the breakers. 

“They’re less in Mayfair.”

“Then go to Mayfair.” He snorted, squashing a clutching motion towards the necklace. 

“Maybe you should try to sell these in Mayfair.”

“I’m never getting into Mayfair.”

“Maybe try?” I suggested. 

“I’m selling them here. What do you want from me, old lady?”

Damn. 

“I want you to dream bigger, kid.”

“Well, I’m selling these now. Do you want them?”

Oh, God I did. I wanted to see my family again. I wanted to call someone who knew me. I wanted to joke without translating. I loved Pallas, and I regret nothing, but God, I hungered for someone who knew what television was. I missed people who used ‘like’ incorrectly, thrown randomly through a sentence. I missed the parents and the brother. 

“Yeah, I want them.” 

The price ended near Mayfair money. Femblem hurt when they left his hands, and his motormouth didn’t cover the agony in his eyes as I pocketed the necklace. You could buy these in Mayfair for less from a salesman. Salesmen were sterile.

I left Femblem in silence, doing meaningless busy work in his shop. Depending on how he handled that price, he was good for a long time. A couple other kids called to me as I walked out, asking how I liked young dark meat. I ignored them. That night I took lodging in a crapped-out building where an old cistern was just a dirty birdbath. A little rain water, a bucket, some elbow power and soap, and I had my reflecting pool. The dreams tingled in my fingers. The dreams couldn’t be mine. Funny, that. I can’t get out with my own dreams. The mirrorwall wouldn’t be breached. 

Around midnight I got through to Calvin. He fussed at me for a while, and I fussed back. I may have called him a little shit. He definitely called me a jackass. I laughed in his face, we giggled together, and the weight didn’t lift from my shoulders but someone else helped carry it. 

Calvin had gone gray at the temples when he was only twenty, but he carried it well. It added a distinctive feature to his face that combined with his glasses made him look striking. He always wore white or silver frames. He was in the bathroom at his apartment, one he’d shown me a few years ago by carrying a hand mirror about the place. Now he manipulated the intensity dial beneath the light switch to match the brightness of Celephias’ star-shot sky, and I watched abstractedly. It was so good to see him.

“Calvin, do you think light switches are science?” I asked.

“Hmm?” he replied. I knew he’d heard me, but he was prompting.

“Just that. Are light switches science? Would you say turning a light on is doing science?”

He thought as he adjusted the brightness, sweeping too dark so I couldn’t see him and then too light which washed him out. The rocks and crud at the bottom of the cistern were easier to see than my brother. He dialed back slowly and found a good resonance. “Perhaps. I wouldn’t say that, but if you said it, I wouldn’t argue. What are you thinking about?”

“Just breaching the mirrorwall. It’s magic, of course. Short ritual, arcane ingredients that I’m not- well, ritual and ingredients definitely. But I don’t know if it’s really magic. I would never call it that, even though it technically is. It’s just a thing you can do for a lot of money.”

“Are the ingredients hard to get?” he asked.

I stalled before replying. “Yeah. They’re- I can’t just find a sorcerer strong enough to make them, so I bought some dreams. They’re- I’m uncomfortable with that.”

“Why?” asked Calvin.

“Because buying people’s dreams? That’s like buying people’s lives. It’s human trafficking.”

“Sis, hiring someone is buying chunks of their life, and even if you’re safe about it, accidents on the job site happen. I went out to a site last week and one of our guys hit himself with a nail gun. He put a ten penny right through his foot. We know accidents like that will happen, and try as we can to avoid them, we pay people to put themselves in that chance.”

“Yes, but you pay for the work. The chance is unavoidable. You do try to mitigate it, don’t you?” 

“Of course.”

“Then there you go. You’re paying people to build houses, not nail their feet.”

“I’m not sure that’s a material difference, and it’s still time of their life. I’m sure they’d rather do other things. Julio, the guy who nailed his foot, good guy, likes Barcelona, would rather be playing music than framing, but we don’t pay him for that.”

“I know all that!” I retorted.

“Do you? You sound unsure of something. What’s really bothering you?”

“I just don’t like it,” I snapped.

“Why?”

“Ugh, I don’t want to talk about it. I just don’t like the idea of taking someone else’s dreams to get mine.”

Calvin mulled that. “Did you give them a good price?”

I muttered. “Yeah,” I concluded.

“Can they dream more? You’re not carving dreams out of their heads or anything, are you?”

“They can,” I said with heavy emphasis on can. “But they’ll never get these back. And they matter to people.”

“You’ve got to give me something more to go on. It sounds a hell of a lot like buying forty hours a week of someone’s youth, and I’m sure I’m not getting it, but I need you to explain.”

“Oh, shut up, idiot.”

Calvin waved his hands at me and looked away.

“You used to understand,” I muttered. Calvin heard, but he didn’t reply. Silence stretched between us.

On the far side there was a knock on Calvin’s door. He opened it, and Jay’s face appeared. She said, “Calvin, do you-” before looking around and seeing me in the mirror.

Jay blinked, and her face froze. Calvin smiled. “Come in here a moment,” he said and put a hand about her waist, pulling her halfway into the bathroom. He turned her to face the mirror.

“Jay, this is my sister.” For an instant he cracked an eyebrow at me. 

“Hello, Jay. I’m Elegy,” I said. I waved because we obviously couldn’t shake hands. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

Jay looked very concerned, and glanced at me, the mirror, the wall around the mirror, and then stuck her head out of the bathroom and looked in this direction along the wall. 

“There’s no hidden compartment. No projector. This is my sister. She’s in Pallas, which is another world, separated from us by mirrors and dreams. She calls me sometimes when she misses me because I’m so much smarter, better looking, cooler, and generally more awesome in every way than she is. I’m also taller. Friendlier. More humble too,” said Calvin.

Obligatorily, I made faces at the towel rack behind them, but my heart wasn’t in it.

“Oh,” said Jay.

There was a long pause.

Jay was a little taller than me with reddish brown hair. She had paint-splatter freckles, and a loose gray shirt over a tighter blue one. The gray shirt said, “University of Austin.” She was wearing mom-jeans and no rings or earrings, nor a watch, but her left hip pocket had a rectangular phone outline. She didn’t look at me. A few times she glanced at the sky behind me, but otherwise looked down at the soap dispenser.

I was viewing a reflecting pool, so the angle would be different. I surreptitiously inched over a dark spot to be sure I didn’t have anything in my nose. Confident, I moved down and tried to lever myself so I was looking at them, not down at them. I had to brace on the cistern wall to do it.

“Anyway, she called to say hello,” said Calvin of me. “We were talking about how magic works. She asked if light-switches were science-” Calvin jiggled the wall switch off and on, which created a strobe effect but didn’t change the light level when he was done. “-because you can’t make circuitry like that work in Pallas. We got onto the subject of mirror-calls, because they’re not really magic either, but of course you couldn’t do one on Earth. Not powered by dreams.”

Jay maintained her shut expression. “Powered by dreams?”

“Yeah. Elegy bought them from someone. You need another person’s dreams. Your own don’t work.”

“You take other people’s dreams?” she asked me. Her voice was neutral.

“I buy them,” I said. “From people who are selling.”

“Oh.”

Jay said nothing and kept looking down at the soap. She stood close to Calvin, slightly in front of him to the side.

Not much else was said. Calvin made a few jokes. I asked about the parents. Jay stood there, at his side between him and me. Our conversation stretched. Finally I said something non-committal about leaving, and Calvin vaguely agreed. I stirred the reflecting pool to break contact and lost him in a cloud of mud and little rocks. 

This was long before the Bloodharvest job, and that was a lot of money I didn’t have to waste. I went to bed angry. 

 

A while later I spoke to him again, burning Femblem’s other dream. I asked about her, and Calvin said she was out of town. Then I asked about her for real. 

“How is Jay?” I asked, innocently. Innocently here means brutally obvious, but my brother’s an idiot.

“Oh, she’s fine. We had dinner last night.”

“So you like her?”

“Yeah.” Calvin nodded.

“Going to marry this one?”

“Maybe.”

I twisted my head sideways and jutted my chin out at him. “Maybe? Not hell no, not you don’t even think about it, not you’re never getting married? Maybe?”

“You idiot, I just said ‘maybe!’ Not yes, not no, just maybe.”

Maybe my ass. That was a yes.

“I see,” I said slowly and cautiously. “So, just supposing you think yes, and yes is a part of maybe, you’re certain she’s the one?”

“Well, I’m not certain if the one is a thing and all. Maybe in Pallas, but on Earth true love sounds like a hell of a lot of work and a decision, not fates and destiny. I’m not sure about anything, of course. That’s why maybe. But I’m certain that right now, she’s not definitely not the one.”

“Have you introduced her to the parents?”

“Nah, not yet. No hurry.”

I took a deep breath. “Calvin, I’m a little worried about her. I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

“You’ve only met her once.”

“Yes, but that was recent. I’ve heard you talk about her a lot. I don’t know what to say about her.”

“Good. You don’t get a say on her anyway.”

“Calvin-”

“Jay will be all right,” he told me. “Take care of yourself,” he added, and broke contact by slapping the mirror.

Reverberations shook the reflecting pool, and a dozen wavelets bounced from edges to center. Silt swirled up on the bottom. He was gone, and I was staring at muddy water, money spent, morals besmirched, and my brother had hung up on me.

That was, of course, why I kept the cardinal rule. Love was in the air, and my idiot brother wasn’t going to listen to his wise sister when love is in the air. It got even worse after they got married, and I had to admit I really liked Jay. That’s terrible! He didn’t listen to me and turned out to be right? It was atrocious. I blame Calvin.

 

I was covered with a blanket of dead leaves in the shadowless gardens. They were warm, and something like sunshine fell on them, putting me in a little oven. Asleep I’d wiggled a piled of gorse under my head. The thorns had all fallen off, and the stems had decayed into softness. They left stripes of rotten wood painted across my face from cheek to ear. I sat up, pushing over brown leaves already crumbling. They disintegrated when moved.

Everything within arm’s reach was dead. Every plant was brown, and those that touched me had partially rotted away. Underneath me the bushes had withered into dirt. Further away, things were dead but erect. Denuded roses stood spiky guard. 

My arms wore old burns, faded red scars from my shoulders to hands, across my back and face, up and down my legs. I was naked; the white dress burned away. Here and there a fragment of ash was stuck to skin with dried blood, but my scabs were weak and pale. They were mostly a yellow crusty matter, held together with dirt and stray cotton threads. I sat among the plants that had died by my presence, and of course I cast no shadow.

Great Dramm Gorban stood quiet while the titan’s hip abutted its cliffs. The windows were dark and still. The ichors and biles of the skeleton that years had not yet drained divided it from Cassan Tun with rivers of titan’s waste, There was still rotting flesh on the skeleton. Elves had built the high roads hundreds or thousands of years ago, and the architecture of the goblin cities bore the marks of Whitehall, that goblin civilization that had only come to an end with Dread’s invasion, the first sacking of Bloodharvest, and Kuranes the Terrible’s reign on the Dreaming Throne. Maybe that was normal. There was a lot of flesh on the skeleton to rot, so perhaps it would take eons.

I needed clothes. I’d been burned to a pink cinder. My work clothes had been removed; my altar girl dress had been immolated. I needed weaponry and clothes. And I could get them both in Cassan Tun.

Rebecca, whom Chastain slew, had been there. Her gear might remain, and the vampires of Cassan Tun had attacked Dramm Gorban. 

I approached the more southerly goblin fortress, alert for any watcher. Down the pedestal of Death Mountain the ichors had carved sluice ways, and by long jumps and climbing, I passed the bile river going south. When I was far enough south that the stink of rot faded, the rock was bare stone. A little grass grew here and there; sometimes coarse bushes and thick weeds. It was funny to see grass hanging to a near vertical wall. Beyond the southern bridge that lead to the rest of the world, true sunlight, and fire, I clambered up to see the other fortress.

It was a mountain like Dramm Gorban, but it had been eaten on the north. There were huge gaps in it. An inward looking crest was almost gone, shaved and removed so the exquisite carving of wind, rain, and fine goblin hands was nothing but blocky ramparts. The westerly face had pits and holes. Quarry ropes lead to scaffolding. A pair of gaps in the soaring curtain cut from crest to foot. 

Cassan Tun had traded geography, majesty, and grace for bloat. Chopped up brickwork bulged out, heading up the backside of Mount Bier’s wide base. Houses were linked by covered chutes. Stairways jutted out of the crest of ugly buildings and stabbed incomplete at the sky, crude images of the great imperfection of the castle’s peak. I bypassed the gate via a tube of hallways. It climbed over the ground and sometimes burrowed through the hillside like a root. The bricks had been poorly set, and there were several ways in.

On the top floors were fighting chambers and empty storage, rooms I left untouched. Below them were vacant floors. At the ground level there were ornamental meeting rooms and a great hall, drawn up with broken tables and stone chairs. One floor down I found living arrangements. The rooms were empty, but marked with names on the doors. Some were smithed, and some were woven of metal threads. Many were cleverly constructed of sword components: tiny pins to hold hand-guards to tangs, and the small cinchings that held leather handwraps still. I trotted down the hallway until I found the room I was looking for, Rebecca whom Chastain slew, and I went in to steal her clothes.

Chastain filled the room. His face regarded me in stone and charcoal on the walls and floor. His profile was cut in her bed-posts; the floor was chalked with his visage. One wall was nothing but Chastain, rubbed and edged with embers from the fire, and in a candle holder were burned sticks that had been worked into drawing points. A dozen small rocks were carved to match his face. There was nothing else here. She didn’t have any musical instruments, no cutlery or silverware. The bed was coarse and carried only a single sheet. A couple short, blunt knives rested in a deep crack between two blocks on the wall. The room had nothing but memories of Chastain and clothing.

Her sandals fit, and her greaves and bracers adjusted to tightness. Hanging in an armoire was a full length bodysuit of tiny knives. It fit. She had been taller than I, but the apparatus of the body suit had many fasteners and cinches, all in the shape of blades. Even the buckles were crafted of tiny war hammers with impaling spikes cleverly twisted through the eyelets of the straps. I felt like I was robing before an audience with all the Chastains looking at me. Once I had clothing and knives I left.

The upper floors of the building were dead. There was a curious absence of human detritus, but plenty of rotting waste kicked under stairs and jammed into cupboards. Walls cracks were stuffed with crud and spiderwebs, the spiders missing, and old spills marred the stonework. The lanterns were empty and dim. It should have been dark, but the doors had rotted away. Now open windows shot bars of light across the hallways and burned the dustmotes. The most interesting thing beyond castle anthropology was a trail of unswept rocks that lead from the doors towards a sinking stairway, rocks that resembled the detritus of birth. I followed them down.

Once below the ground Cassan Tun thrived. Hallways held tables, closets mops and brooms, the spaces between doors had flower stands or stray pegs. Foliage from outside was delicately arrayed in vases behind glass cases, and the flowers were still alive. They flourished in crystal decanters of black water. Their blossoms and leaves were green or red, but veins of ebony ran through the stems. They smelled bitter and sharp, yet the colors were more vibrant than outside. Something about them turned luminous in the dark.

I went down.

In the feasting hall three floors below ground, broken birth-coffins lay across the ground among skeletons of cattle and bears. The room stank. I skittered out to inspect the dead. 

The human bits weren’t all male, unlike Pearl’s legions. Both female and male torsos and legs were about, torn apart and ripped open, with cow skulls shorn open and bull heads peeled. It took adjustment to see rib cages as wide as my open arms as slender, and pick certain heavier, wider pelvic boulders from the rest, but once I got the rhythm, more than half of those here had been female. Many broken coffins had feet or heads left inside the end furthest from the break. In vitro they’d been torn apart and consumed. There were no signs of a struggle, not like the wreckage left in Pearl’s ivy retreat from the bull. In addition there were a number of bear skulls on giant human torsos. The ursine heads were disproportionately large on the skeletons of human giants, bodies three to four meters tall with necks angled forward where the head met the shoulders. The skulls themselves were immense for both cattle and bear. I could wear one over my head like a helmet. 

After the inspection, I stood in a corner, thinking. They’d all been eaten. When the vampires of Cassan Tun took births from the titan, they ate them.

“Hmm,” I said, and the grunt sounded neutral.


	8. The Titan and the God

Chapter 7

I left Cassan Tun feeling dirty. 

South and west of Cassan Tun the pedestal of Mount Bier curved back to the north. The titan’s leg sprawled over the white canyon with its two layers of clouds. I popped a seat on a rock where I could see anyone coming at me to think.

While I meant to watch for attackers, I wound up staring at the titan’s leg-bones. The leg had to be a league long. The giant herself would be two or three. I wasn’t sure of perspective, and the upper body didn’t sit straight. She splayed against the mountain. Across the canyon the church-like manor of Coventry rose from manacle-foundations to keep the titan’s ankles locked down, and above and behind it the sweeping walls of Gorat’s Interdiction reached the sky. There wasn’t as much sky as you would expect. A wagon-wheel of it marked the center of up, but the well-walls circumscribed it narrowly. Outside the canyon true sunlight hit the swords plunged into stone, and they burned like crosses against the steep rock. Above, in the dead center of the wheel of sky, the greatest of all sword handles burned the same way, its blade more leagues long and driven through the rotting bones of Titan’s Breast into mount Bier. That sword made this Death Mountain. It pinned the corpse to the ground, where in eons it would rot away.

What could have caused that? What lead to her death here, pinned to the ground in a well just for her? 

Was it Gorat? He was a war god but an early one. He was force and fire, not fury and human strife. Gorat was God of Uncaring Violence, the swords that came flying without concern for whose flesh caught them. He didn’t consider enemies or victims. Some of the others, Bolge for example, weren’t any less violent, but they lead troops. They were gods of Men and Women fighting. Those who died in Bolge’s name were martyrs. Those who died to Gorat fed the grass. Worshipers of Gorat had the same relationship with their patron as alcoholics to the bottle.

What kind of sword was that? A zweihander? I wasn’t sure if the term fit. There are preconceptions built into terms like that: measurements. A zweihander might be two meters long. It probably wouldn’t be, but imagine that’s the outside limit. The iron that pinned the sky to the mountain was what; three leagues? Is the term meaningfully relevant at that size? Its handle caught sunlight and burned like a flaming cross in the center of the sky. I looked for the smaller, upper handguard. There was none. 

Why did I think of Gorat and the sword, I asked myself, and almost instantly had the answer. Because I knew something of Gorat, and I knew something of swords. I knew nothing of titans and nothing of her. 

Well, she was dead. She had a human skull. I thought about size and backtracked hard. Her skull had human features proportional to the rest of her. Dead and rotting she gave birth to minotaurs and werebears. 

Confronting a blank wall of ignorance, I didn’t know how to proceed. I was pretty sure birthing minotaurs and werebears after death was unusual, perhaps even unique, but I wasn’t sure where exactly unique started. Was birthing minotaurs and werebears at all unique? Maybe being born after death was the normal way for them. I had never heard of either before, and there were things that reproduced after death: plants, some fungi. Animals get pretty weird. There’s probably one that reproduces necromatically. She was a three-league-tall skeleton pinned to Death Mountain, popping out inhuman children from her rotting flesh. Where, exactly, did I want to draw the unusual line?

Not for the first time, I wondered how I had gotten myself into this situation. 

All right, Elegy. Start thinking. Where do we go from here?

I was going to have to go back to Dramm Gorban. I would need to do something about Orweil. Luthia could spare me from buying dreams forever, but in exchange, she wanted Orweil. She wanted him alive. Orweil might not survive our next meeting. He’d cut my shadow from my body with the blade of Luthas, and that did not bode well for him. 

As I sat under the shadowless sword of Gorat and thought, I came to the nub of my aversion to returning to Dramm Gorban. I did not take missions to go kill people. I had incidentally killed people. Several goblins of Bloodharvest had done poorly in the wake of my arrival, but I’d never taken an explicit assignment to end someone. Perhaps that was just vanity, but my gut said no. There’s a difference. And if I went back to Dramm Gorban it would be to kill Orweil. I wouldn’t do that.

If I could, I’d just leave. I was prepared to walk away. But I couldn’t. Orweil had eaten my shadow, and that violated the law of the sun. A giant ball of flaming gas has only one punishment for breaking its laws, one I was powerfully averse to. Even if I stayed forever from sunlight, I was bound by oaths to Luthia on the bloodstone, and she didn’t seem to type to change her mind. I couldn’t leave, I refused to undertake Orweil’s killing, and I wouldn’t help him get out.

I could go to Dramm Gorban, help the minotaurs bound to Pearl escape, and if Orweil happened to get in my way, solve his problem the same way I’d solved the problems of goblins of Bloodharvest strangling their captives before they let them escape.

That was self-indulgent prevaricating. Was I going to kill Orweil or not? Self, don’t bullshit me.

“Rebecca?” asked a confused voice.

Bloody hell, I’d completely forgotten my watch.

I whirled around and stared at Chastain, who stood a safe distance away. His hands were open, but ancient patterns of blood and fire had outlined his knuckles and veins until they made fists of flat fingers. He wore that mail of knife-blades, and for the first time I noticed that his mail and mine matched. 

“Oh, you. Sorry. You- you don’t look like her at all. She was fire haired and fierce.”

“Didn’t you want to eat me a few hours ago?” I demanded.

“Probably.” He shrugged. “What difference does it make? You’re here, which means it was no better than you deserve.”

“No!” I yelled and hopped off my rock. I put it between us. “And it makes a lot of difference to me!”

“Yes, yes. My mistake. You’re trapped in vampire hell in vampire armor. I’m sure you’re a good person.”

That’s- “I’m in vampire armor because you put me in a sacrifice gown to eat me!”

“Maybe true,” he agreed.

“Maybe nothing! And I tried to leave, but Orweil ate my shadow and now sunlight sets me on fire!”

“He ate your shadow? He was supposed to share!”

I stared at him for a long moment, and there were knives in my hands.

“Here again,” he said faintly, talking to himself. Increasingly to me, he asked, “Blades. Teeth. Are you blood, flesh, or bone?”

I had another moment of introspection. He was far enough away I’d have to run at him. The small knives I carried didn’t fly far. I could also run from him, but I didn’t feel like it. “All of them,” I said. “I’m human.”

“We all are,” he replied. He sank back into thought.

Chastain advanced and I gave way, but he didn’t assault. He came to the rock and sat down. “I came here to remember. Rebecca met me here. She would come to think. We talked. We’ll talk no more. Who are you? How did you offend the gods?”

Independent thought, probably. “Elegy,” I replied. “I’m from far away.”

“Of course. Where in particular, or at least, where most recently?”

I got the feeling he wasn’t really listening to me. Sometimes his hands closed, but they didn’t clench. They remembered fists, and he stared at them as if he didn’t. But he wanted words.

I didn’t really want to fight him, so I didn’t.

“Wilno. I’m most recently from Wilno.”

“Oh.” He looked moderately surprised. “How is it? Baron Ozymandias is still dead, isn’t he?”

“Last I was there.”

“Good. The man was a bastard.” He gave a minuscule head tilt and grimace. “Not that I don’t wish he survived in my selfish moments.”

“You knew him?”

“Quite well. I was in his service.”

Chastain submerged in his head, leaving me little more than an outside observer. As he thought he mouthed words, but right now he was deep underwater, unable to come up for air. Nothing but faint lip gestures came out of his mouth. I didn’t trust him, and didn’t want to be near him. Yet he’d spoken of the Baron, and in Wilno, people avoid talking of the Baron. 

Not to say they ignore him. They mouth praises of him. ‘He was a great man,’ they’ll say as if obliged. But they don’t talk of him. 

If I was going to put up with this guy- “What did you do in his service?”

Chastain looked at me. He was still speaking for himself, but he smiled. “I was his guardian angel.”


	9. Chastain's Story 1

Did you know Gorat was Ozymandias’ God? I do not mean to insult. The Baron was an avowed atheist, so few people would know. 

Gods assign warding angels at their own choosing. Bolge rents them. Angels remain with his followers for one battle and must be sought again after. Demos claims every soul who will ever worship her has already had an angel assigned since she took sextant and plotted fate. That’s...quite a statement. Rhys, Morpheus, and Vyer all send their guardian angels at baptism, which is why in the high Doon the doctor wets his hands before delivery. It’s also one of the reason those three have female priests.

Gorat doesn’t. Gorat sends no one. Violence is his worshipers birthright. I have no idea why I was assigned Ozymandias. I didn’t start asking that question until long after. But I was. I had been one of Gorat’s Furies, his howling vengeances who bless the world with his favor. The world was a deserving target, and it was glorious.

Being summoned I flew to Kyr from the outer wastes where I waited. Gorat allows us no mansions, but we Furies had taken Mare Ipfallay, a hilltop beside a dark sea on the dome of the sky. It lies behind the red star Sirion. From Ipfallay we could look down at the framework of the heavens, and the tracks of the stars over Pallas. Pallas itself hung like our moon, covered across the middle with the fires of Sirion. All Pallas either blazed or shook like fever dreams in the heat of the red warstar, and we could look down on battle. I dreamed of visiting them. I awoke to Gorat’s horn blowing a single note. It called and carried me to his hall. 

The arches of heaven in which the stars move on their tracks are not smooth. They are beaten with impacts and rusted with leakage from the waters of the firmaments. Mount Kyr where Gorat dwells is the tallest of all peaks, but its top is not so high as Perihelion, nor its root so deep as Aphelion. Yet it is a fang from root to crest, and veins of magma flow through it like a nerve. It lies near the black horizon of furthermost south. At the heart of Kyr is Gorat’s throne room, where he rests bound to his molten chair. I remember his age and his power, the chains that manacle him, and the way he sighed as orange lava flowed about his feet. He was consumed by an uncommon bitterness, and seeing him, I expected to do great work on someone worthy of my attention. 

‘Go to Pallas and ward the one Ozymandias, Baron of Wilno. Tell him you are his guardian, and let nothing happen to him, lest you build a monument to me in wrath,’ said Gorat. 

‘My Lord, My God,’ I replied.

‘My Fist,’ Gorat named me and turned away. He was immersed with reflection on a dim corridor, one that was familiar to me at the time. I have forgotten it. Now I remember the shape of the tall peak, the stone ripples on either side, and the darkness within. Staring down it did not temper him, nor did it give him any pleasure. His old skin was thin, and he seemed gaunt. Gorat’s rages bring him strength, but this one poisoned him. 

 

 

Here Chastain shook and blinked at the blank sky. He didn’t immediately continue. After breathing for a little bit, he batted some thistle buds. They poked his fingers and would spear him if they could, but Chastain’s callused hand smacked them with little more strength then the wind. 

He was dark haired and scruffy-faced with a heavy jaw. The sides and back of his head were shaved, and his top hair was wild, full of cowlicks. The dome of the back of his skull stuck out sharply, and the muscles on his neck pulled the skin taught against it. He was taller than me, of course, but that’s just because the world is unfair. Everyone’s taller than me. Right now he was calm, and his muscle soft under the flesh. When he’d spoken of Gorat, he had gestured sharply, and his knuckles flexed as he punched the air, indicating God and Furies. The bloodstains and burn marks that reached up his wrists to the forearm bracers looked at first like physical stains, but after he stopped batting the thistle head, he rubbed his hands abstractedly. The stains moved. He pushed them around, and they leaked on his skin, never marking the palm of his left from the back of his right, but smearing like oil under cellophane. If they were tattoos, they moved like water.

I tried to figure out if Chastain was lying. In conversation, when not talking of Gorat and Kyr, he had the Wilno accent. Other times it faded into proper but stilted Thian, the common language of Wilno and Celephias. They both maintain its theirs. Referring to Kyr and God, Chastain spoke crudely, like he learned the words from old books, and I got the impression he spoke as he had been taught. When he spoke of Wilno he slurred his short words and dropped trailing consonants. That’s how they talk. While I was perfectly prepared to believe he was shoveling the bullshit deep, he had also set himself up for obvious failure. He was about to start talking of Wilno, and he had no idea what I already knew.

Of course, I’ve never met anyone with tattoos that moved like water. He drew circles in ink on his wrists with his fidgeting. 

“Bone,” he said suddenly. He’d caught me looking at his hand. His accent was effortless now, and if he was faking it, he was doing an excellent job. “One of the three elements of life. Do you know martial arts?”

“Of. I don’t practice,” I said.

“But you’re familiar with the four elemental styles? Fire, Water, Earth, Air?”

“Yes.”

“We use the elements of life: Blood, Bone, and Flesh. That’s Bone.” He made a loose fist and held it out, so I could look at the back of his hand. His knuckles burned, and trails of fire ran up his arms like tattoos. Smoke patterns stained his skin like the bloodstains. He smeared them around but didn’t clean anything. 

“Rebecca-” He wiggled a finger vaguely at my clothing. “-was a master of Blood. It’s a diffuse style. It was a bad match-up for her. She-” he paused again. “Died.”

That was a neutral way of saying it. I didn’t hide my disdain. “You killed her,” I corrected him.

“Yes,” he agreed. “But it will be easier if you understand.”

This was a murderer, I reminded myself. Do not give him the benefit of any doubt.

He continued, looking down. “Wilno? I came to Wilno. The Baron was still alive, Alyssa had but met Satyr, Mandrake and Van lived alone, and Luthia and Ducarte were not yet traitors. Seth was gone somewhere. I don’t care much about him. I could go anywhere, see anything, and doors unconsecrated to other gods were open to me.

“The consecrated ones-” he breath laughed. “Gorat wouldn’t mind. Gorat encouraged me. An angel walking through a door dedicated to another god is an asshole looking for a fight, and my God was Gorat.”

He looked at me again, up from his hands. I was glaring at him, and he looked me dead in the eye and smiled. 

 

I took a doorway from the near reaches and stepped into a secret chapel. Built among the foundations of House Royal it was little more than a closet, shoved between great blocks of stone that held the weight of walls and towers. A woman knelt before a tiny altar to Theseen as I emerged from the sanctum that was also broom storage. She opened her mouth in shock.

“Stop me,” I replied and went to the main door.

This one shimmered when I forced it, and invisible threads gripped door and frame, resisting my efforts. I pushed harder. The door shivered, and the web rang with distant voices shouting, ‘no.’ I reversed the pressure and pulled the door closed. For a moment the complaints subsided, but I yanked the wooden handle inwards and pulled the door apart. It crumbled into the chapel with whispers. 

“If that was your best try, you have failed,” I told the woman and walked out. 

I emerged into a hallway. That had been the closest door to the Baron. I looked left and saw little people bustling. To the right the hallway was low and quiet, unlit except where open doors to bright rooms cast silhouettes on the walls. Few people were in the dim corridor, and those hurried. There was a distinct lack of Barons.

For several long moments I stared right and left, and suddenly, as they say, it dawned. I looked up.

House Royal was built before the decapitation of Wilno’s mountains was complete, and thus the ground floor was a compromise between several peaks at the same summit and built over chasms and trenches. An underworld of servants corridors threaded these trenches, winding under ballrooms and climbing inside the walls. When Ozymandias had first built the basilica he’d paid close attention to the flow of power through antechambers, fireplace chimneys for the powerful, suites for his children. Tunnels circulating the people who cleaned those antechambers, stocked the fireplaces, and emptied the pots in those suites were stuffed wherever they could be. My feet touched the Bones of the city, but the corridor was vascular. Some places the walls gurgled with springwater. I was under the great throne room of House Royal, beneath the foot of the dais that lead to the high seat. It would be back, three or four steps behind me, over a broom closet.

So be it. I wasn’t here to quibble. I found a crack in the wall and tested the ceiling. Wide flagstones rested on powerful rafters, broad beams of oak as heavy and dense as mountain bones. I placed my fingertips against the stone and felt the tiny shuffle of feet, slight movements of attendants standing bored in place.

I grabbed a crack between two flags and yanked the floor open.

Stone broke, shattering and crashing down. People screamed. I ripped a carpet aside and crawled out of a heap of shrieking. Two great wedges of stone were lifted on either side of me like black granite wings, throwing those above into a plug over the hole to the dark tunnels below. I thrashed out of the pit and stormed past them to the very foot of the dais. 

“Baron, I have come for you!” I shouted as Gorat had ordered.

Warriors screamed and drew their swords. Glory!


	10. Conflict

“Hypothetically speaking, I can see how that might give them a wrong first-impression,” I said to Chastain.

“First impressions are nonsense. Only what’s in your heart matters,” he replied.

“Eh,” I observed.

 

Half those present were driven to their knees by Godspeak. Some of them screamed. Guards dropped their swords, and deaf men cried. They fell dumbstruck. Their armor banged sharp and hollow against the floor and each other, trying to ring but full of human body. Buckles rasped on breastplates; sandals tumbled off feet. Baron Ozymandias’s colors were white and red, and when his soldiers hit the floor, it looked like a massacre in snow. 

On the other side of the nave were probably thirty strangers wearing a sick rainbow of colors. They had robes, long ones that impaired their movement and combat, in a vile combination of ocher reds and sick greens. Some were in blue, black, and even white. All of them were wrapped about the chin and nose with long scarves in equally evil adornment, and at my voice, they descended into madness. The guards had been shocked and astonished, but these ran screaming, smashing into each other or wailing. They vomited and fell. Every time one hit another they latched on and shrieked like rabbits, clawing at each other. Among them one emerged draped in yellow. There was something vile about him. His color was dehydrated urine. The rest were bald-headed with fat beads of sweat rolling over their ugly domes to get caught in flesh rolls on the backs of their heads, but this one had a tall hat like a single-beaked wimple. It was connected to his scarf and veils in a hanging nest of fine saffron gauze. He crumbled to the ground, laughing on his knees, and singing. 

Baron Ozymandias had fallen on his throne. He sat in the same place, but instead of sitting firmly, tall and proud, he slouched. His feet strained against the floor as his silk shoes fought for purchase, sliding away from him until the toe caught under the sole and bent his feet in crescents towards the heel. He pushed backwards against the arm rests, trying to drive his back through the chair. He was a thin man, old, fit. He had trimmed eyebrows and decent hair, hid a saggy chin with a smooth beard, wore flattering clothes. His groomer did impeccable knife-work. I towered over my protectorate.

“DO NOT TOUCH HIM!”

It hit me, knocked me down. It was the voice of Bolge before the throne of Gorat. The Clockwork Gods’ heavens rusted and melted. It was the voice of the ransom-price Bolge for the kingdom of warriors from Gorat’s empire of war. Bolge, the traitor-student who learned clockwork before the primordial gods of gear and spring were overcome by flesh and blood. He made my God a legion of beings molded of iron like the old gods had shaped men out of clay. Bolge wanted all warriors for himself so instead of souls, he had given us Gorat’s name. I learned to fight and walk at the same time, suckled at no weak mother’s tit, and my first word was battle. Gorat had been pleased.

I heard Bolge’s voice. Like the damn mortals, I fell over, and shielded my eyes.

Bolge wasn’t here. I saw Van.

“Down!” yelled Van in Godspeak. “Down and flee! Begone from Wilno and do not harm my father!”

He had shouted with such passion he’d blown the skin off me. I was marked with tiger-stripes of blood. I was-

This human had shouted at me in Godspeak. 

My God was Gorat.

“Silence, mensch!” I shouted the lanterns from the walls and threw them at him. Oil sloshed a rainbow of fire across the nave from pillar to pillar. Torches on the far walls, low and easy to replace, shattered in iron scones. The splinters turned to burning fog. “I kill as Gorat wills!” 

“For Amenthar!” replied Van. He drew and charged. I hit him before the throne.

Van had all of the old man’s conditioning, a little extra height, and youth. Van wore mail I’ve never seen before, some weird intricacy of wire that looped up and down over him. It was done in the pattern of white-water rapids. Some of it was silver foam by his shoulders and elbows, under his arms where the weak ribs were, and protecting the good veins by his neck. Blued steel coiled over his chest, down his arms and legs. He had gloves and greaves of the same. I think he had a helmet but wasn’t wearing it when I had emerged. 

People who think to put on their helmets aren’t the kind of fanatics who lose themselves to their gods and speak the divine tongue. I have nothing to say. There were swords around, but I wanted my hands on the man who had shouted my maker’s name at me in defiance of my God. Van had a sword. That would do.

Van attacked with no hesitation. He had no doubt. As I ran from far outside range to outside, he shot from a right guard to a double-handed lunge and planted his foot in what could have broken his ankle. Yet the Baron’s cathedral-hall had polished floors, and Van wore metal. He smashed his foot down and slid. I was charging high, and he caught me in the sternum the instant before his arms locked, thrusting through the body.

But I am Gorat’s will. The sword warped in his hands, bowed wide to the left as the pit dug against my ribs. It bulged. The swordsman was caught in perfect drive, trying to put the point through my body instead of into it, and steel turned to an edged spring between us, building up the combination of our furies. It did not stop me. I hit Van, his form broke, and my name and his own sword threw him against the farthest wall. The sword shattered on extension. 

The impact of man-in-metal on stone wall echoed, and I gave my first word in praise to Gorat. Done, I looked for the Baron.

He had seen and run away barefoot. His silk shoes were gone before they could slow him down.

If he was running, that meant he was fleeing some threat. I needed to get closer to protect him. I ran after.

The old man was quick. He darted through a back door and down twisting passages, ones he obviously knew well. Many short hallways ended in stray stairs where these after thought corridors were laid over or under the quarried rocks. It was nearly impossible to make time through them. Ozymandias knew every change and knew when doorways opened at sharp angles to the sides. They were easy to run past without noticing. He hopped from ground to the top of a double-stair and twisted hard to the right, down another half-flight until his fleeing waist was at foot level in the chamber he just left. A triplet of steps he hurdled entirely because on the far side they were matched with four stairs down. Not knowing, I had to run up and over, then across and down. If he could slam a door he did, but he never waited. He stopped the first time I missed a passage, heard him, and made a doorway through the wall between his corridor and mine. Then he just ran, and I ran after.

In a far corridor he exhausted his supply of turnings. There was a long straight between a kitchen and an empty dormitory. Farm laborers worked the fields during the summer and as apprentice masons during the winter, but now the dorm was empty. The passage to it was dark, heavy with dust. Ozymandias made the conduit with some time, but here I could run free. I consumed his lead by the time he exited.

Several things happened very quickly as we shot from unlit hallway to labor-hall. First, the sudden return to light faded everything white, and I’m not certain what I saw. 

I heard, ‘Behind me!” in an out-of breath voice ahead. 

I also heard a thud and bump.

I went through the door and caught a beam with my face, an old one that broke in half. It didn’t faze me. On the far side I heard no running and in the sudden glare, could not properly see exactly what was going on. The Baron knelt, and someone in black stood before him. Something about her filled me with concern. She was tall but bent, like a shadow, and at first I thought she was another doorway to a darker part of the castle. Her hands were over my charge. 

“Do not touch the ward of Gorat!” I commanded her. Echoes blew straw plugging rat holes through the walls, and individual stalks shot outside. They caught the winds and spiraled back to tap the stone. The white glare of sudden sunlight swirled with motes of shape. 

Like a dancer following, the dark doorway cried, “My Father! He’s killed him!” and she shot an arm out at the doorway beside me.

“What-” screamed someone who had hit me with a board, and I hit him with Gorat’s Fist.

The will of Gorat is not like the wills of men. His small words carry his power. I built him a monument in wrath, one hit from the molten slag of Kyr, fang-mountain, ruined clockwork volcano where my God’s rages flow in lava through the tatters of the preceding gods to visit His power with my hand. Killing Earnesto taught me his name, for otherwise how could I properly rear Gorat’s monument?

The shattering of Earnesto’s body followed his veins. His lesser parts, fingers, loins, ears, vaporized. The withering turned them to dust that scaled away in gray ash. His greater parts, torso, hips, and head, did not, and when the breaking of his body sloughed apart his skin so that the fires of molten-cored Kyr burned through his bones and erupted from his orifices, it was his exterior flesh that immolated last. It wasn’t quick. For a long while after dying his flesh stayed upright, cooking on a core of stone. Finally it all burned aside. Grim basalt crumpled to his knees as Earnesto knelt crying. 

“Blessed are we,” I prayed.

The woman who was a doorway looked concerned. She looked at me and the weeping statue, opening her mouth as if to say something else but shutting it. Looking down she saw the Baron. He had curled up hugging his knees. She did not move. 

In charged a man and a woman.

Alyssa was the woman. She wasn’t as tall as her sister Luthia and curvier. She was very small, but her face was a little heart unlike Luthia’s sharp oval. Her hair was auburn with strays of blond. With her came Satyr, a worthy adversary. There was something alike in him and Van. Physically they both had height and strength; both wore metal. But Satyr wore his helmet, and he didn’t have Van’s aggressive strength. He wasn’t on display like Alyssa’s oldest brother. He did hover protectively beside her until stepping aside when he saw Luthia. The movement was wise. It put him in confrontation with me without them getting in the way. Past the doorway enough to retain movement, they paused.

Luthia stabbed a finger at me. “He did it!” she yelled. 

I glanced at the monument of Earnesto. Lava still poured from the statue’s eye-holes to run down his face, where it merged with the fountain from his lips. Her statement was true, and though I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by yelling it, it did not matter. Satyr drew and attacked.

He carried a blunt broadsword, slightly more than a forearm of blade with a dull, heavy point. A round shield was slung on a harness on his back, and Satyr did a hip motion that slung it onto his arm with the ease of breathing. When he chopped, I let him catch me in the neck so I could shrug and seize his blade between shoulder and throat. His eyes went wide behind his visor, and I dropped a huge right hand on his chest. 

He caught it with leather and iron. The shield broke. I pushed through to the chest and struck him to the ground, where he hit and slid in a shower of sparks. Alyssa screamed. I still had Satyr’s sword trapped against my neck. I lowered my shoulder and caught the weapon as it fell. It looked competent. I tossed it aside. 

“Run,” gasped Satyr from the floor. 

I kicked him through the door. He clipped the frame and took some of it with him. He spun like a rag until he struck a wall, and fell. His helmet seemed to be facing his left side, but a bit of one eye was visible. I walked forward and he climbed upright, his body angled. The helmet jaw had cut into his shoulder piece, and it wouldn’t turn straight. Satyr looked like he was dancing, turning sideways to keep me in his his visor holes as he strained his neck under all that metal and harness. 

I kicked his shoulder and tried to stave metal through his chest. Instead he skidded sideways down the hallway, banging from column to column until a low unevenness in the floor caught his feet. He fell hard, thrashing. I walked over and ripped his helmet off. Metal screamed, buckles broke, and half his gear fell apart. I shredded the rest. Satyr took a few gauntleted shots on my face. It was good. He was trying. I grabbed his hair, put his skull against the ground, and dropped a hammerfist.

I hit power. A black dome of sky caught my hand before I could finish the knight, and sunbursts flared under the anvil of my hand. Aldebaran burned redly. Comets Saffron and Thos scattered from the impact like startled pigeons. I saw the Moon, the dance of planets, the white smear of Grey Havoc, and behind Dephthenese, the Lovers, Satyr’s terrified eyes. 

Amusingly, I still had a grip on his head. My other wrist passed through the sheltering sky like a black hole. I tried to squeeze his skull. The cosmos resisted me.

Not to worry. Even the heavens won’t last forever.

He couldn’t get away or dodge, so there was no reason to use short, fast motions. I reared back, got my weight behind me, and dropped nine huge shots trying to break the world. The granite flagstone underneath him buckled and cracked. Rifts shot down to a dull red light, venting the scent of sulfur. Molten granite has a distinct smell. It’s different from lesser lavas, and the first hints of it escaped the floor’s cracks. 

Satyr kept trying. He yanked away and lost some hair for it. He bit my hand, punched my head, and tried to grab my balls. Nothing mattered. I was Gorat’s Fury. The star-studded dome that protected his head resisted my fist, but it faded like the coming of dawn. 

Luthia summoned the Nemesis of Gorat’s Obelisk.

I hope the Gods damn rune magic.

“BLESSED ARE WE!” roared something too low to be human, too distinct to be an animal, and too powerful to be mortal. It was a thale, a ram-headed angel of Theseen. She calls them her Protectors. The thale charged for me, and the breaking of the floor ripped down the walls with the monster’s coming.

Theseen is the protector of servants and migrants. She wards those who are cast from their birthplaces and travel seeking work. I couldn’t translate the exact message the thale’s terrible fist, but I think She was mad at me for breaking Her chapel under the throne room. 

Again, not to worry. Gorat would forgive me.

Everything up to now had been a prelude for the impact of that hit, and I was intent on getting Satyr killed first. I wanted that done. I needed his life complete. Sadly, Luthia’s Starshield did not break, and it retained a faded hint of the evening prior at the end. The brightest stars and last to sleep remained in the sky to the west as my fist brought the sun in the east. They were almost gone. A mild fog would have killed Satyr. The air remained clear. The thale hit me.

There was a wall at the far end of the corridor I broke. 

There was another wall beyond that that I almost broke.

The thale came through like a elephant charging a mouse hole, caught my throat, and did unto me as I had done onto Satyr. We took out the floor. We broke the walls. We gouged a chasm into the ground until natural fault lines in the mountains under Wilno broke before us and ceased resisting as our battle bored into the earth. 

Minotaurs are a form of thale, the most common one and the only thales that exist in Pallas alone, outside the domiciles of heaven. The animals may wear the head of many beasts. I know of bulls, bears, goats, and this one that was a ram. It’s skull was protected by broad spiraling horns. They feud with each other over which skull is the most attractive, competing savagely for mates because Theseen blesses each union. Children are born more powerful than their parents, and though the time between generations is long, they are a great and ascending race. This one was young, and therefore far removed from their antecedents. The metal of Theseen’s grace was alloyed deep into its being. 

I was made in perfection by Bolge in ancient times, when the world was full of divinity. I have spent millenia mastering the Bone Fist. The ram-headed thale had a skull built to sustain such impacts. Neither of us knew exhaustion and could survive terrible wounds. I do not know if I could die by sustained injury and not sudden, overwhelming trauma. 

I don’t know who would have won. Wilno would have lost. We were shattering the mountain-roots underneath the city when magic circumscribed me and pulled me from honor. It was not my fault. I tried to fight, but there’s no grabbing magic. It’s liquid. The thale kept fighting and I strove to stay in combat with it, but magic won. I faded away like stars after dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm lost as to how to include tags for original fiction. If you have good ideas, please share.


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